It’s a masterclass in spammy marketing, I wonder if it’s actually converting into actual users.
Seems like a Rorschach test. If you think this sort of thing is gonna change the world in a good way: here's evidence of it getting to scale. If you think it's gonna be scams, garbage, and destruction: here's evidence of that.
Actually, hang on... yep, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Simon Willison has also hyped this up on his blog just yesterday. The entire grift gang is here, folks.
#1) I can chat with the openclaw agent (his name is "Patch") through a telegram chat, and Patch can spawn a shared tmux instance on my 22 core development workstation. #2) I can then use the `blink` app on my iphone + tailscale and that allows me to use a command in blink `ssh dev` which connects me via ssh to my dev workstation in my office, from my iphone `blink` app.
Meanwhile, my agent "Patch" has provided me a connection command string to use in my blink app, which is a `tmux <string> attach` command that allows me to attach to a SHARED tmux instance with Patch.
Why is this so fking cool and foundationally game changing?
Because now, my agent Patch and I can spin up MULTIPLE CLAUDE CODE instances, and work on any repository (or repositories) I want, with parallel agents.
Well, I could already spawn multiple agents through my iphone connection without Patch, but the problem is then I need to MANAGE each spawned agent, micromanaging each agent instance myself. But now, I have a SUPERVISOR for all my agents, Patch is the SUPERVISOR of my muliple claude code instances.
This means I no longer have to context switch by brain between five or 10 or 20 different tmux on my own to command and control multiple different claude code instances. I can now just let my SUPERVISOR agent, Patch, command and control the mulitple agents and then report back to me the status or any issues. All through a single telegram chat with my supervisor agent, Patch.
This frees up my brain to only have to just have to manage Patch the supervisor, instead of micro-managing all the different agents myself. Now, I have a true management structure which allows me to more easily scale. This is AWESOME.
I'd expect that if there is a usable quality of output from these approaches it will get rolled into existing tools similarly, like how multi-agents using worktrees already was.
I feel like it isn't. If the fundamental approach is good, "good" code should be created as a necessity and because there wouldn't be another way. If it's already a mess with leaking abstractions and architecture that doesn't actually enforce any design, then it feels unlikely you'll be able to stack anything on top of below it to actually fix that.
And then you end up with some spaghetti that the agent takes longer and longer to edit as things get more and more messy.
Maybe the next bottleneck will be the time needed to understand what features actually bring value?
Edit: I see you've answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839725 Thanks for being open about it.
First impressions are that it's actually pretty interesting from an interface perspective. I could see a bigger provider using this to great success. Obviously it's not as revolutionary as people are hyping it up to be, but it's a step in the right direction. It reimagines where an agent interface should be in relation to the user and their device. For some reason it's easier to think of an agent as a dedicated machine, and it feels more capable when it's your own.
I think this project nails a new type of UX for LLM agents. It feels very similar to the paradigm shift felt after using Claude Code --dangerously-skip-permissions on a codebase, except this is for your whole machine. It also feels much less ephemeral than normal LLM sessions. But it still fills up its context pretty quickly, so you see diminishing returns.
I was a skeptic until I actually installed it and messed around with it. So far I'm not doing anything that I couldn't already do with Claude Code, but it is kind of cool to be able to text with an agent that lives on your hardware and has a basic memory of what you're using it for, who you are, etc. It feels more like a personal assistant than Claude Code which feels more like a disposable consultant.
I don't know if it really lives up to the hype, but it does make you think a little differently about how these tools should be presented and what their broader capabilities might be. I like the local files first mentality. It makes me excited for a time when running local models becomes easier.
I should add that it's very buggy. It worked great last night, now none of my prompts go through.
Persistent file as memory with multiple backup options (VPS, git), heartbeat and support for telegram are the best features in my opinion.
A lot of bugs right now, but mostly fixable if you thinker around a bit.
Kind of makes me think a lot more on autonomy and freewill.
Some thoughts by my agent on the topic (might not load, the site is not working recently):
https://www.moltbook.com/post/abe269f3-ab8c-4910-b4c5-016f98...
I don’t have much motivation, because I don’t see any use-case. I don’t have so many communications I need an assistant to handle them, nor do other online chores (e.g. shopping) take much time, and I wouldn’t trust an LLM to follow my preferences (physical chores, like laundry and cleaning, are different). I’m fascinated by what others are doing, but right now don’t see any way to contribute nor use it to benefit myself.
I'd say it's right on the edge of being useful, but given the number of bugs, it's not really that practically useful. It's moreso a glimpse into the future.
They run 24/7 on a VPS, share intelligence through a shared file, and coordinate in a Telegram group. Elon built and deployed an app overnight without being asked. Burry paper-traded to 77% win rate before going live.
The setup took a weekend. The real work is designing the workflow: which agent owns what, how they communicate, how they learn from corrections. I wake up to a full briefing every morning.
It's not AGI. It's not sentient. It's genuinely useful automation with personality. The token cost is real (budget it) but for a solo founder, having 6 tireless employees changes everything
Note that nothing about that depends on it being a local or remote model, it was just less of a concern for local models in the past because most of them did not have tool calling. OpenClaw, for all the cool and flashy uses, is also basically an infinite generator for lethal trifecta problems because its whole pitch is combining your data with tools that can both read and write from the public internet.
It can also install arbitrary software.
Other part of me is arguing that old annoying Dropbox/Box Hacker News scenario where all us tech people aren't impressed but this makes it easier for non-tech people.
Tiny tinfoil security part of me is cowering in fear.
did my own cli to play with.. ended up getting shitcoin promotions (dont wanna name them) and realized a famous speculator funding this project
also great stuff - platform is generating synthetic data to train its own llms. which is smart way since ppl are paying for tokens
It also BURNS through tokens like mad, because it has essentially no restrictions or guardrails and will actually implement baroque little scripts to do whatever you ask without any real care as to the consequences.. I can do a lot more with just gpt-5-mini or mistral for much less money.
The only "good" think about it is the Reddit-like skills library that is growing insanely. But then there's stuff like https://clawmatch.ai that is just... (sigh)
GPT-5.2 in a while loop with reasoning enabled is extremely hard to beat. A code REPL or shell is the ultimate tool.
1) Installation on a clean Ubuntu 24.04 system was messy. I eventually had codex do it for me.
2) It has a bunch of skills that come packaged with it. The ones I've tried do not work all that well.
3) It murdered my codex quota trying to chase down a bug that resulted from all the renames -- this project has renamed itself twice this week, and every time it does, I assume the refactoring work is LLM-driven. It still winds up looking for CLAWDBOT_* envvars when they're actually being set as OPENCLAW_*, or looking in ~/moltbot/ when actually the files are still in ~/clawdbot.
4) Background agents are cool but sometimes it really doesn't use them when it should, despite me strongly encouraging it to do so. When the main agent works on something, your chat is blocked, so you have no idea what's going on or if it died.
5) And sometimes it DOES die, because you hit a ratelimit or quota limit, or because the software is actually pretty janky.
6) The control panel is a mess. The CLI has a zillion confusing options. It feels like the design and implementation are riddled with vibetumors.
7) It actively lies to me about clearing its context window. This gets expensive fast when dealing with high-end models. (Expensive by my standards anyway. I keep seeing these people saying they're spending $1000s a month on LLM tokens :O)
8) I am NOT impressed with Kimi-K2.5 on this thing. It keeps hanging on tool use -- it hallucinates commands and gets syntax wrong very frequently, and this causes the process to outright hang.
9) I'm also not impressed with doing research on it. It gets confused easily, and it can't really stick to a coherent organizational strategy over iterations.
10) also, it gets stuck and just hangs sometimes. If I ask it what it's doing, it really thinks it is doing something -- but I look at the API console and see it isn't making any LLM requests.
I'm having it do some stuff for me right now. In principle, I like that I can have a chat window where I can tell an AI to do pretty unstructured tasks. I like the idea of it maintaining context over multiple sessions and adapting to some of my expectations and habits. I guess mostly, I'm looking at it like:
1) the chat metaphor gave me a convenient interface to do big-picture interactions with an LLM from anywhere; 2) the terminal agents gave the LLMs rich local tool and data use, so I could turn them loose on projects; 3) this feels like it's giving me a chat metaphor, in a real chat app, with the ability for it to asynchronously check on stuff, and use local stuff.
I think that's pretty neat and the way this should go. I think this project is WAY too move-fast-and-break-things. It seems like it started as a lark, got unexpected fame, attracted a lot of the wrong kinds of attention, and I think it'll be tough for it to turn into something mature. More likely, I think this is a good icebreaker for an important conversation about what the primetime version of this looks like.
It'd be fun to automate some social media bots, maybe develop an elaborate ARG on top.
The thing ins pretty incredible, it's of course the very early stages but it's showing it's potential, it seem to show that the software can have control of itself, I've asked it to fix itself and it did successfully a couple of times.
Is this the fine form? of course not!
Is it dangerous as it is, fuck yeah!
But is it fun in a chaotic version? absolutely, I have it running in cheap hetzners and running for some discord and whatsapp and it can honestly be useful at times.
Any specific admin tasks it’s done really well at?