I have a strong suspicion its because of openclaw mania that happened like 3 to 4 months ago.
Basically you can have your own 24/7 AI Employee. At-least thats the appeal and folks were buying mac minis massively.
Just my gut feel. Everybody moved on from that now. But it was a big deal back then.
If you use OpenClaw now can you tell us how it's going?
I used it to try it out. Security wise I don't trust it at all so I had it running in a VM and local models.
It was able to create an application that Claude created, using the same instructions file. Considerably slower but I was surprised it could do it.
I used it initially. It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high..
Now, I use claude code directly on my machine with the remote control flag.. so its like open claw exactly. I can be outside and give commands to it via mobile app
caffeinate -is -t 7200 claude --remote-control
then Control + Command + Q ftw
(keep system from sleeping if plugged in, keep system from going idle even if not plugged in, for 2 hours, start claude code w/ remote control enabled, lock my mac w/ the keyboard shutcut)
The Amphetamine app from the App Store keeps a MacBook awake even with the lid closed.
I've been using it since about February, still using it. It's running on my old M1 MBP. I have a lot of automations on OpenClaw, things like "Every week summarize this data and send me a message about it" or "check when a new version of an NPM package comes out and submit a PR to update it."
It's quite expensive from a value per token perspective. It's quite cheap from a "send one message from my phone and it does something probably productive" perspective. No major security breaches yet.
All of the use cases I see seem like stuff that’s better performed by normal software. Dependabot will watch for new versions and submit a PR for free.
AI for developing software that runs predictably seems more useful than AI performing actions like a program would.
yeah i think the deterministic part (sending email, submit PR) is usually done by a normale script/software, agents are useful for summarizing text in a smart way, expecially if you need to aggregate text from multiple sources and it's natural language (not structured data)