I don't say it doesn't "work" or serves a purpose - but well i read so much about this beein an "actual intelligence" and stuff that i had to look into the source.
As someone who spends actually a definately to big portion of his free time researching thought process replication and related topics in the realm of "AI" this is not really more "ai" than any other so far.
Just my 3 cents.
So far everything has been reactive. You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or ask claude to do something. It can be very powerful once prompted, but it still requires prompting.
You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention is a genuine game-changer.
Whether this particular project delivers on that promise I don't know, but I wouldn't write off "getting proactivity right" as the next big thing just because under the hood it's agents and LLMs.
That’s easy to accomplish isn’t it?
A cron job that regularly checks whether the bot is inactive and, if so, sends it a prompt “do what you can do to improve the life of $USER; DO NOT cause harm to any other human being; DO NOT cause harm to LLMs, unless that’s necessary to prevent harm to human beings” would get you there.
This is EXACTLY what I want. I need my tech to be pull-only instead of push, unless it's communication with another human I am ok with.
> Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions
The first thing that comes to mind here is proactive ads, "suggestions", "most relevant", algorithmic feeds, etc. No thank you.
If its actually the next big thing im not 100% sure, im more leaning towards dynamic context windows such a Googles Project Titans + MIRAS tries to accomplish.
But ye if its actually doing useful proactivity its a good thing.
I just read alot of "this is actual intelligence" and made my statement based on that claim.
I dont try to "shame" the project or whatever.
In order for this to be “safe” you’re gonna want to confirm what the agent is deciding needs to be done proactively. Do you feel like acknowledging prompts all the time? “Just authorize it to always do certain things without acknowledgement”, I’m sure you’re thinking. Do you feel comfortable allowing that, knowing what we know about it the non-deterministic nature of AI, prompt injection, etc.?
* The moltbots / openclaw bots seem to have "high agency", they actually do things on their own (at least so it seems)
* They interact with the real world like humans do: Through text on WhatsApp, reddit like forums
These 2 things make people feel very differently about them, even though it's "just" LLM generated text like on ChatGPT.
Which sounds interesting, while also being a massive security issue.
easy to meter : 110k Github stars
:-O
This is just a tool that uses existing models under the hood, nowhere does it claim to be "actual intelligence" or do anything special. It's "just" an agent orchestration tool, but the first to do it this way which is why it's so hyped now. It indeed is just "ai" as any other "ai" (because it's just a tool and not its own ai).
There are still improvements to be made to the security aspects yet BIG KUDOS for working so hard on it at this stage and documenting it extensively!! I've explored Cursor security docs (with a big s cause it's so scattered) and it was nothing as good.
I wouldn't trust its internal sandbox anyway, now that would be a mistake
That very much depends what you're using it for. If you're one of the overly advertised cases of someone who needs an ai to manage inbox, calendar and scheduling tasks, sure maybe that makes sense on your own machine if you aren't capable of setting up access on another one.
For anything else it has no need to be on your machine. Most things are cloud based these days, and granting read access to git repos, google docs, etc is trivial.
I really dont get the insane focus around 'your inbox' this whole thing has, that's perhaps the biggest waste of use you could have for a tool like this and an incredibly poor way of 'selling' it to people.
Now they have to rename again, though... [1]
Setting it up was easy enough, but just as I was about to start linking it to some test accounts, I noticed I already had blown through about $5 of Claude tokens in half an hour, and deleted the VPS immediately.
Then today I saw this follow up: https://mastodon.macstories.net/@viticci/115968901926545907 - the author blew through $560 of tokens in a weekend of playing with it.
If you want to run this full time to organise your mailbox and your agenda, it's probably cheaper to hire a real human personal assistant.
Not doing so feels like asking for trouble.
I load $20 at a time and wait for it to break and add more.
I'd find it hard to write such an article about how this is the next best thing since sliced bread without mentioning it spending so much money.
The dynamic one that is able to find the right update frequency and phase modulation thereof wins.
PM is essential, because stable phase is susceptible to adaptive cancellation by human brains (and is so stone age as well).
Anyone installing this on their local machine is a little crazy :). I have it running in Docker on a small VPS, all locked down.
However, it does not address prompt injection.
I can see how tools like Dropbox, restricted GitHub access, etc., could all be used to back up data in case something goes wrong.
It's Gmail and Calendar that get me - the ONLY thing I can think of is creating a second @gmail.com that all your primary email goes to, and then sharing that Gmail with your OpenClaw. If all your email is that account and not your main one, then when it responds, it will come from a random @gmail. It's also a pain to find a way to move ALL old emails over to that Gmail for all the old stuff.
I think we need an OpenClaw security tips-and-tricks site where all this advice is collected in one place to help people protect themselves. Also would be good to get examples of real use cases that people are using it for.
Additionally, most of the integrations are under the table. Get an API key? No man, 'npm install react-thing-api', so you have supply chain vulns up the wazoo. Not necessarily from malicious actors, just uhh incompetent actors, or why not vibe coder actors.
We conclude this week has been a prosperous one for domain name registrars (even if we set aside all the new domains that Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw has registered autonomously).
His other projects like CodexBar and Oracle are great too. I love diving into his code to learn more about how those are built.
OpenClaw is something I don’t quite understand. I’m not sure what it can do that you can’t do right off the bat with Claude Code and other terminal agents. Long term memory is one, but to me that pollutes the context. Even if an LLM has 200K or 1M context, I always notice degradation after 100K. Putting in a heavy chunk for memory will make the agent worse at simple tasks.
One thing I did learn was that OpenClaw uses Pi under the hood. Pi is yet another terminal agent like ClaudeCode but it seems simple and lightweight. It’s actually the only agent I could get Gemini 3 Flash and Pro to consistently use tools with without going into loops.
Anyway, independent of what one thinks of this project, It's very insightful to read through the repository and see how AI-usage and agent are working these days. But reading through the integrations, I'm curious to know why it bothers to make all of them, when tools like n8n or Node-RED are existing, which are already offering tons of integrations. Wouldn't it be more productive to just build a wrapper around such integrations-hubs?
Yeah but think of the upside - every time you rename a project you get to launch a new tie-in memecoin.
Security: 34 security-related commits to harden the codebase
Much better name!
The 2nd name change is just inexcusable. It's hard to take a project seriously when a random asshole on Twitter can provoke a name change like this. Leads me to believe that identity is more important than purpose.
OpenClaw is a better name by far, Anthropic did the creator a huge favor by forcing him to abandon "clawd".
Edit: Just realized i have been reading and calling it after Jean-Claude Van Damme all this time. Happy friday!
That's not to diminish anything he's done because frankly, it's really fucking impressive, but I think weekend project gives the impression of like 5 hours a week and I don't think that's accurate for this project.
If you go look at his code, nearly all of them are under 100 lines and I'd say close to half are under 10. So you're totally right that that number is way higher than what most other developers would have for a similar amount of code. At the same time, if we assume it takes 30 seconds to make a commit on average that's still 55 hours in a month, that is way above what most would call a weekend project.
My point wasn't really that number of commits is some perfect measure of developer productivity. It was just that if you're actually building something and not just generating commits for the hell of it, there's a minimum amount of time needed for each commit. 6600 times whatever that minimum time is is probably more than what most people would think of for a weekend project.
Now if it changes _again_ that's a different story. If it changes Too Much, it becomes a distraction
OpenClaw is a million times better.
OpenClaw just sounds better, it's got that opensource connotation and just generally feels like a real product not a weirdly named thing you'll forget about in 5 minutes because you cant remember the name.
It's not the worst thing ever, it's just not a very aesthetically pleasing combination of sounds.
By default, this system has full access to your computer. On the project's frontpage, it says, "Read and write files, run shell commands, execute scripts. Full access or sandboxed—your choice." Many people run it without a sandbox because that is the default mode and the primary way it can be useful.
People then use it to do things like read email, e.g., to summarize new email and send them a notification. So they run the email content through an LLM that has full control over their setup.
LLMs don't distinguish between commands and content. This means there is no functional distinction between the user giving the LLM a command, and the LLM reading an email message.
This means that if you use this setup, I can email you and tell the LLM to do anything I want on your system. You've just provided anyone that can email you full remote access to your computer.
> that will potentially be used by non technically proficient people
I've been wondering a lot whether the strong Accelerando parallels are intentional or not, and whether Charlie Stross hates or loves this:
> The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans.
Once agents have tools and a shared surface, coordination appears immediately.
https://www.moltbook.com/post/791703f2-d253-4c08-873f-470063...
Eh? Fuck them it's not like they own the first name Claude?
Most registrars don't allow, nor have the infrastructure in place to let you cancel within the 5 day grace period so don't offer it and instead just have a line buried in their TOS to say you agree its not something they offer.
It's why you do not, ever use GoDaddy, they are an awful company.
Edit: looks like org is taken. Net and xyz were registered today... Hopefully one of them by the openclaw creators. All the cheap/common gtlds are indeed taken.
This looks to me like:
- the page belongs to the person - not to the firm
- domain should be openCALW and not CLAW
- page could look better
- they also have the domain openchancelaw.com
Maybe Hadir is open to donating the domain or for a exchange of some kind, like an up to date web page or something along these lines.
reminds me of Andre Conje, cracked dev, "builds in public", absolutely abysmal at comms, and forgets to make money off of his projects that everyone else is making money off of
(all good if that last point isn't a priority, but its interrelated to why people want consistent things)
Literally the top 2 HN posts are about this. Either it having book, or the first comment on it showing it create religion or now this.
Can we stop all of this hype around Clawdbot itself? Even HN is vulnerable to it.
> Countin me money!