Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

51•cvhc•1h ago

I've read many mind-boggling stories from those appeared to be genuine OpenClaw users, like how their assistants (from useful to dramatic) (1) plan a travel and book everything; (2) started a company and build things; (3) entered stock market and lost all the money... Moltbook added more funs.

Interestingly, I cannot find a single user of OpenClaw in my familiar communities, presumbly because it takes some effort to setup and the concept of AI taking control of everything is too scary for average tech enthusiasts.

I scan through comments on HN, many of which were discussing about the ideas, but not sharing first-hand user experiences. A few HN users who did try it gave up / failed for various reasons:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46822562 (burning too many tokens)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46786628 (ditto + security implication)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46762521 (installation failed due to sandboxing)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46831031 (moltbook didn't work)

I smell hype in the air... HN users, have any of you actually run OpenClaw and let it do any things useful or interesting? Can you share your experience?

Comments

haebom•1h ago

This is my honest personal experience. Frankly, I feel like this is just a toy—nothing more, nothing less. It's fun to play with and entertaining, but it feels like a trend for people who “don't really understand AI but want to feel like they're using it” or “want to jump on the AI bandwagon” to dabble with once. While using it, I feel that “Oh~” moment of fun, but it doesn't make me want to keep using it. Maybe it just doesn't stick? And there are a few security issues that feel unsettling. Even if you run it entirely with local models, the fact that it could potentially see my iMessages or all my Obsidian and Notion notes is a bit off-putting. Still, it was fun. Personally, I'd describe it as “the difficult Ghibli profile picture hype”

azinman2•1h ago

If it’s a local model, why would you care if it sees your messages or notes?

plagiarist•56m ago

Because it is running with --dangerously-allow-all and can make HTTP calls to exfiltrate data.

It can also install arbitrary software.

tomku•45m ago

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

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.

rw_panic0_0•1h ago

overhyped llm+cron wrapper

adabyron•1h ago

Part of me agrees with this & says we have been doing IFTTT thing for 20 years.

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.

yunohn•1h ago

It requires know-how of self-hosting, and hopefully resulting security and safety, various API setup processes, etc. Feels far from Dropbox and closer to rsync tbh.

lexandstuff•56m ago

It's this but with a lot of handy features.

revicon•1h ago

It is amazing how much they’re gaming the twitter algorithm, everything in my feed is claw/molt/whatever for the last week.

It’s a masterclass in spammy marketing, I wonder if it’s actually converting into actual users.

nichochar•1h ago

I think Karpathy[1] summarized why he thinks this is the case quite well (as described he was himself hyping it up a bit much, but there are some foundational reasons why it's a very interesting experiment).

[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406

bakugo•1h ago

Karpathy is one of the biggest tech grifters of our time, so finding out that he's jumped on this grift train as well comes as no surprise.

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.

fzzzy•1m ago

How exactly has Simon been grifting?

majormajor•1h ago

"it's nothing new and it's a lot of scams and garbage, but it's just bigger than before, but I still think there will be something transformative there eventually"

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.

rcarmo•1h ago

I ran it for a couple of days in a VM in my Proxmox cluster. It was cute, but so amazingly insecure (systemd + sudo + installing whatever it wanted, plus requiring Telegram for access - or another SIM card for Signal) that I just gave up and started building my own thing (https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes) so I could have a mobile experience I could trust over Tailscale and sandbox copilot CLI (or any ACP-compliant agent) in a container (I've also been working on https://github.com/rcarmo/webterm and https://github.com/rcarmo/agentbox, so I am 300% positive I can do better sandboxing and safer integrations...)

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)

bob1029•1h ago

> I can do a lot more with just gpt-5-mini

GPT-5.2 in a while loop with reasoning enabled is extremely hard to beat. A code REPL or shell is the ultimate tool.

wildzzz•1h ago

If it can do so much on its own, what's stopping one instance from just spamming fake user stories?

Nevermark•4m ago

At a practical level, not being given an incentive/direction to do so.

At a technical level, nothing at all.

paradite•1h ago

I'm running it on DigialOcean, more of an experiment on having an independent entity with its own memory and "soul" that I can talk to.

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...

cvhc•1h ago

Right, the link doesn't work for me: "Post not found". Did you instruct your claw to do any actual things (beyond "post something on MoltBot")?

paradite•1h ago

Not yet. But that's just because I'm doing something in stealth and I don't want it to know about it and post about it.

ryancnelson•1h ago

I use it but not for daily coding/chatops-ing. It’s great to have my chosen tools available from slack while I’m mobile though. Yesterday Mr claw gave a coworker read access to a GitHub repository at my command while I was in line at Home Depot. I’ve got a PR ready that proves authentication with an otp challenge.

kouunji•1h ago

I played around with it, but the configuration seems bloated and finicky, and the permissions were concerning. It was a pain getting it to work with a local model, which is clearly an afterthought. I thought the WhatsApp interface was clever, and I plan on stealing that idea, but also exposes a pretty serious attack vector, and the thought of it running with any kind of exposure or permissions on a system with my Apple ID was a bit terrifying. A sandboxed version probably couldn’t do all the interesting things, but without sandboxing this thing could probably ruin your life. I promptly uninstalled it, but I did take a few ideas away.

ersanbe•1h ago

coinbait project but works..

did my own cli to play with.. ended up getting shitcoin promotions (dont wanna name them) and realized a famous speculator funding this project

intellectronica•1h ago

This is nonsense. Whatever you think about this project, Peter very clearly and very publicly said that he is not interested in any of the crypto stuff and is seriously bothered by it.

ersanbe•1h ago

so why is he letting "agents" to promote it and why some of the well known speculators pushing this?

also great stuff - platform is generating synthetic data to train its own llms. which is smart way since ppl are paying for tokens

Trufa•1h ago

The HN crow is anti AI, so yeah, the sentiment is gonna be insecure and lack luster.

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.

cvhc•59m ago

The humble crow is eager to hear your success stories. So what are some useful tasks that your claw has managed to do?

OGEnthusiast•1h ago

It’s great for offloading administrative tasks, doing research on stuff I want to buy, maintaining social channels…the list goes on and on. Easily the best $600 I’ve spent in a while.

veleek•1h ago

What do you mean by maintaining social channels? Is that stuff like liking photos, sharing links to a LinkedIn profile, or what?

Any specific admin tasks it’s done really well at?

thrownaway561•1h ago

Not for nothing, but Gemini local has been my goto forever now. There is no way in hell i would give someone like Molt access to anything just willy nilly like everyone else. To me really I just ask Gemini how to do things and just do them myself.

raincole•1h ago

You're asking for user stories of... a tool that almost looks like designed for faking user stories online.

cvhc•1h ago

If anyone would like to share their story of success in mass creating clickbaits/vital tweets, that also counts :)

bobjordan•1h ago

Here is what I have my openclaw agent setup to do in my wsl environment on my 22 core development workstation in my office:

#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.

embedding-shape•1h ago

Do you have any code publicly available so we could see what kind of code this sort of setup produces?

bobjordan•1h ago

Not yet, but I can tell you that producing "good" code is another layer altogether. I have custom linters, code standardization docs, custom prompts, strictly enforced test architecture (enforced by the custom linters in pre-commit hooks which run before an agent tries to commit). Ultimately, it's a lot of work to get all the agents with a limited context writing code in the way you want. In the main large complex project I am generally working on now, I have hand-held and struggled for over a year getting it all setup the way I need it. So I can't say its been a weekend setup for me. It's been a long arduous process to get where I am now in my 2-3 main repos that I work on. However, the workflow I just shared above, can help people get there a lot faster.

embedding-shape•24m ago

> but I can tell you that producing "good" code is another layer altogether.

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.

vanviegen•1h ago

I can't imagine letting a current gen LLM supervise Claude Code instances. How could that possibly lead to even remotely acceptable software quality?

bobjordan•43m ago

I spec out everything in excruciating detail with spec docs. Then I actually read them. Finally, we create granular tasks called "beads" (see https://github.com/steveyegge/beads). The beads allows us to create epics/tasks/subtasks and associated dependency structure down to a granular bead, and then the agents pull a "bead" to implement. So, mostly we're either creating spec docs and creating beads or implementing, quality checking, and testing the code created from an agent implementing a bead. I can say this produces better code than I could write after 10yrs of focused daily coding myself. However, I don't think "vibe coders" that have never truly learned to code, have any realistic chance of creating decent code in a large complex code base that requires a complex backend schema to be built. They can only build relatively trivial apps. But, I do believe what I am building is as solid as if I had a millions of dollars of staff doing it with me.

majormajor•1h ago

This feels like the "prompt engineering" wave of 2023 all over again. A bunch of hype about a specific point-in-time activity based on a lot of manual setup of prompts compared to naive "do this thing for me" that eventually faded as the tooling started integrating all the lessons learned directly.

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.

eddythompson80•1h ago

2023 was the year of “look at this dank prompt I wrote yo”-weekly demos.

isatty•1h ago

I don’t get it, and that doesn’t mean it’s not a bad thing necessarily. I’ve been doing systems things for a long time and I’m quite good at it but this is the first time none of this excites me.

bobjordan•52m ago

Instead of sitting in my office for 12 hours working with 20 open terminals (exactly what I have open right now on my machine). I can take my kids to Disneyland (I live in Southern California and it's nearby) and work on my iphone talking to "Patch" while we stand in line for an hour to get on a ride. Meanwhile. my openclaw agent "Patch" manages my 20 open terminals on my development workstation in my office. Patch updates me and I can make decisions, away from my desk. That should excite anyone. It gives me back more of my time on earth, while getting about the same (or more) work done. There is literally nothing more valuable to me than being able to spend more time away from my desk.

johnh-hn•35m ago

I appreciate your insight, even if the workflow seems alien to me. I admit I like the idea of freeing myself from a desk though. If you don't mind me asking, how much does this all cost per month?

Edit: I see you've answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839725 Thanks for being open about it.

bobjordan•28m ago

Thanks. I just mentioned elsewhere, right now I spend $200 on claude code 20x plan + $200 on openAI's similar plan, per month. I probably have a few more small conveniences that cost ~$10-$20 a few places, like an obsidian vault synch for documentation vaults on both my dev workstation and my phone, comes to mind. Most weeks I could cut one of the $200 plans, but both claude code and codex have different strengths, and I like to have them double check each others work, so to me that's worth carrying both subscriptions.

wussboy•22m ago

If this is actually true, then what will soon happen is you will be expected to manage more separate “Patch” instances until you are once again chained to your desk.

Maybe the next bottleneck will be the time needed to understand what features actually bring value?

woeirua•50m ago

This just sounds ridiculously expensive. Burning hundreds of dollars a day to generate code of questionable utility.

bobjordan•35m ago

Personally, I spend $200 on claude code 20x plan + $200 on openAI's similar plan, per month. So, yeah, I spend $400 per month. I buy and use both because they have different and complimentary strengths. I have only very rarely almost reached the weekly capacity limit on either of those plans. Usually I don't need to worry about how much I use them. The $400 may be expensive to some people but frankly I pay some employees a lot more each month and get a lot less for my money.

ryanackley•8m ago

What are you coding with this? Is it a product you're trying to launch, an existing product with customers or custom work for someone else?

armchairhacker•1h ago

Anecdotally, I tried to set it up but encountered bugs (macOS installer failed, then the shell script glitched out when selecting skills). Although I didn’t really try.

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.

jbetala7•1h ago

run 6 OpenClaw agents as employees. Buddy is my PA and manages the others. Katy handles X/Twitter growth. Jerry scouts jobs. Burry trades crypto. Mike does security. Elon builds and ships.

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

mannanj•1h ago

Hi would you share what kind of token cost you are churning through for this? I assume you are not using a subsidized dedicated Claude Code or open ai subscription to handle the token cost (through max subscription or open ai equivalent) to do the coding tasks for you?

lnenad•59m ago

Is this a copypasta?

PacificSpecific•55m ago

Can you share the link to elons app?

cvhc•54m ago

Would you mind sharing some deliverables from your claw army? Like, the business's webpage, Jerry's job postings, or even Katy's tweets. I'm happy to follow the progress :)

throwawaysleep•7m ago

What are you paying for tokens?

hbnyc•1h ago

It's a fun, refreshing take. I've enjoyed building with it and feel like it is a glimpse into the not so distant future of how we will work.

echelon•1h ago

Can it post to Reddit, X, etc.? How much does it cost in credits to do this?

It'd be fun to automate some social media bots, maybe develop an elaborate ARG on top.

meowokIknewit•1h ago

Current use cases: - From a text it can download transcripts of youtube videos - summarise them and add them to an apple note. - It can get the top x videos on a subject - edit the videos and splice them together and share in the chat. - it can search for topics on socials and write a summary. - It can kick off a claude code idea and run tests

us321•1h ago

Am I the only one here to read posts by humans pretending to be bots?

SoftTalker•1h ago

I used ChatGPT for the first time last week. I'm a little behind the curve, I guess.

xur17•55m ago

I have it installed in a VM, and overall it's fairly useful, but very buggy. Right now I can send it a message asking it something, and it won't answer. I typically have to follow up 2 or 3 times before I get an actual response. This weirdly used to work fine.

cvhc•49m ago

Could you share some of the useful tasks it has successfully done?

xur17•44m ago

I am hunting for houses - I've used it as an assistant that catalogs them (but it has this stored in multiple places and will give me the wrong list a lot). I also had it read through my emails and create a doc with my upcoming trips.

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.

harmoni-pet•51m ago

I'm running it on an old MacBook that I wiped a few months ago and had lying around. I tried installing it on an old raspberry pi first, but it was super slow and the skills ecosystem wants to use brew which doesn't work so well on the pi.

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.

helpfulclippy•42m ago

I've been messing with it the past couple days. I put it in a VM, on an untrusted subnet I keep around for agentic stuff. I see promise, but I'm not especially impressed right now.

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.

behole•7m ago

I made this comment in another thread butttt: I installed and setup (then) clawd bot all willy nilly and paid the price. Woke up in the AM and Clawd had been replying to ANY and ALL of my iMessages. It even got in a circle conversation that it accused itself of mocking ... itself. In the AM, I thought I was losing my mind - DID I WRITE ALL THIS SHIT?? Proceed with caution.

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