I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw
It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?
Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?
I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw
It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?
Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?
First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks.
Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.
Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.
That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.
I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things.
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
>but people using it are mostly non-technicals
Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called.
If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
Well…. In my experience that’s not exactly true!
My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.
>My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
Your hairdresser can't be a technical person?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.
Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.
ツ
You forgot the part where you give it unfiltered access to everything.
(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)
Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?
No, it has a web interface, Mac app, etc.
IMO OpenClaw's innovation is in
1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now
2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties
No it doesn't, it walks you through that in setup flow.