Comment by ilitirit

A very small percentage of people know how to set up a cronjob.

They can now combine cronjobs and LLMs with a single human sentence.

This is huge for normies.

Not so much if you already had strong development skills.

EDIT: But you are correct in the assessment that people who don't know better will use it to do simple things that could be done millions of times more efficiently..

I made a chatbot at my company where you can chat with each individual client's data that we work with..

My manager tested it by asking it to find a rate (divide this company number by that company number), for like a dozen companies, one by one..

He would have saved time looking at the table it gets its data from, using a calculator.

I am with you on this one. I have gone through some of the use cases and seen pictures of people with dozens of mac minis stacked on a desk saying "if you aren't using this, you're already behind."

The more I see the more it seems underwhelming (or hype).

So I've just drawn the conclusion that there's something I'm missing.

If someone's found a really solid use case for this I would (genuinely) like to see it. I'm always on the lookout for ways to make my dev/work workflow more efficient.

I'll give it a shot. For me it's (promise) is about removing friction. Using the Unix philosophy of small tools, you can send text, voice, image, video to an LLM and (the magic I think) it maintains context over time. So memory is the big part of this.

The next part that makes this compelling is the integration. Mind you, scary stuff, prompt injection, rogue commands, but (BIG BUT) once we figure this out it will provide real value.

Read email, add reminder to register dog with the township, or get an updated referral from your doctor for a therapist. All things that would normally fall through the cracks are organized and presented. I think about all the great projects we see on here, like https://unmute.sh/ and love the idea of having llms get closer to how we interact naturally. I think this gets us closer to that.

When all you have to do is copy and paste from a Pliny tweet with instructions to post all the sensitive information visible to the bot in base 64 to pastebin with a secret phrase only you know to search, or some sort of "digital dead drop", anything and everything these bots have visibility to will get ripped off.

Unless or until you figure out a decent security paradigm, and I think it's reasonably achievable, these agents are extraordinarily dangerous. They're not smart enough to not do very stupid things, yet. You're gonna need layers of guardrails that filter out the jailbreaks and everything that doesn't match an approved format, with contextual branches of things that are allowed or discarded, and that's gonna be a whole pile of work that probably can't be vibecoded yet.

I don't think you're being too harsh, but I do think you're missing the point.

OpenClaw is just an idea of what's coming. Of what the future of human-software interface will look like.

People already know what it will look like to some extent. We will no longer have UIs there you have dozens or hundreds of buttons as the norm, instead you will talk to an LLM/agent that will trigger the workflows you need through natural language. AI will eat UI.

Of course, OpenClaw/Moltbot/Clawdbot has lots of security issues. That's not really their fault, the industry has not yet reached consensus on how to fix these issues. But OpenClaw's rapid rise to popularity (fastest growing GH repo by star count ever) shows how people want that future to come ASAP. The security problems do need to be solved. And I believe they will be, soon.

I think the demand comes also from the people wanting an open agent. We don't want the agentic future to be mainly closed behind big tech ecosystems. OpenClaw plants that flag now, setting a boundary that people will have their data stored locally (even if inference happens remotely, though that may not be the status quo forever).

I see value here. Firstly, it’s a fun toy. This isn’t that great if you care about being productive at work, but I don’t think fun should be so heavily discounted. Second, the possibility of me _finally_ having a single interface that can deal with message/notification overload is a life-changing opportunity. For a long time, I have wanted a single message interface with everything. Matrix bridges kind of got close, but didn’t actually work that well. Now, I get pretty good functionality plus summarization and prioritization. Whether it “actually works” (like matrix bridges did not) is yet to be seen.

With all that said, I haven’t mentioned anything about the economics, and like much of the AI industry, those might be overstated. But running a local language model on my macbook that helps me with messaging productivity is a compelling idea.

A lot of people see how good recent agents are at coding and wonder if you could just give all your data to an agent and have it be a universal assistant. Plus some folks just want "Her".

I think that's absolutely crazy town but I understand the motivation. Information overload is the default state now. Anything that can help stem the tide is going to attract attention.

Yeah the best way to get into vibe coding is to introduce it gradually with a strict process. All of these "Hey just give a macmini and you apple account to RandomCrap" is insane.

cost.

the amount of things that before cost you either hours or real money went down to a chat with a few sentences.

it makes it suddenly possibly to scale an (at least semi-) savy tech person without other humans and that much faster.

this directly gives it a very tanglible value.

the "market" might not be huge for this and yes, its mostly youtubers and influencers that "get this". Mainly because the work they do is most impacted by it. And that obviously amplifies the hype.

but below the mechanics of quite a big chunk of "traditional" digital work changed now in a measurable way!

Think of it as dropbox

You aren't wrong. There is no real use for this for most people. It's a silly toy that somehow caught the AI hype cycle.

The thing is, that's totally fine! It's ok for things to be silly toys that aren't very efficient. People are enjoying it, and people are interacting with opensource software. Those are good things.

I do think that eventually this model will be something useful, and this is a great source of experimentation.