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OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS

https://www.flyingpenguin.com/build-an-openclaw-free-secure-always-on-local-ai-agent/
61•feigewalnuss•1h ago

Comments

piker•55m ago
Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? I just personally have zero interest in letting an AI into my comms and see no value there whatsoever. Probably negative.
_pdp_•52m ago
There is value but it is hard to discover and extract outside of a few known areas - like coding, etc.
piker•49m ago
Yes, I can see the (potential) value in working with agents in software development. The “claw” movement I understood to suggest value in less constrained access to my inbox, personal messages, calendar etc like some sort of PA. It’s hard to quantify how much damage a bad PA can do to someone’s personal and professional life, so if my understand is correct, this seems like a dead end.
TheDong•46m ago
I find some value as kinda a better alexa.

I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.

I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"

I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.

It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa

It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.

puelocesar•41m ago
180 grand a month for PA is a lot of money. But I guess each person has its own priority. I mean, I can pay a very fancy gym with that price instead of the shitty popular one I go, which would probably improve my well being much more than asking to play Gorillaz
quietbritishjim•17m ago
"a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!
tikotus•31m ago
I don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.
TeMPOraL•9m ago
It's not the only thing they're doing with it. I mean, the logic is sound - $180 goes into automating bunch of manual processes in personal life, one of which is getting movies, which in some cases involves going out on the high seas.
LeCompteSftware•3m ago
Let's also point out the $180 is going to a hideously evil AI company which pirated millions of books and movies.
retired•17m ago
> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits

In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that. She will happily play your Beatles song, download the Titanic movie for you, find your Gorillaz song and even cook and take care of your children.

It's horrible that we have such human exploitation in 2026, but it does put into perspective how much those credits are if you can get a real-life person doing those tasks for less.

quietbritishjim•9m ago
I'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).
swiftcoder•3m ago
The Netherlands has a weird and exploitative setup where you can classify your au pair as a "cultural exchange", and then pay them literal peanuts (room and board plus a token amount of "pocket money")
retired•1m ago
From what I can see online, the average compensation that an au-pair in The Netherlands receives is 300 euro per month, with living expenses being covered by the family. There is no minimum wage requirement for au-pairs like in the UK or the US.
kombine•8m ago
We shouldn't have to "import" people from poorer countries to do the mundane tasks we got too lazy to do ourselves.
DrewADesign•20s ago
Surely that’s subsidized?

A lot of people in the Silicon Valley area spend that much ($6/day) on coffee. What they don’t realize is how out of touch they are in thinking makes sense for the rest of the fucking world. $180/mo is about 5% of the median US per capita income. It’s not going to pick your kids up from school, do your taxes, fix your car, or do the dishes. It’s going to download movies and call restaurants and play music. It’s a hobby, high-touch leisure assistant that costs a lot of money.

bluedel•13m ago
Am I right to be a little concerned by the phrase "it'll go straight to the pirate bay"?

Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?

swiftcoder•2m ago
> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.

I have a hard time imagining how much better Alexa would have to be for me to spend $180/month on it...

onchainintel•39m ago
It all depends on what you do aka your use case. If you're in the content creatio business, which is part of my responsibilities, then yes has been massively helpful. For other roles, I can absolutely see no use case or benefit. Context matters, like with everything.
iugtmkbdfil834•21m ago
Eh, buddy says he uses them for his network and, apparently, some light IT maintenance for his family members. So far it seems to be working for him. I am not that brave.
mathgladiator•12m ago
Agent environments like OpenClaw are in the toy phase, and OpenClaw is teaching people how to build things with agents in a toy-like and unreliable way. I used my understanding of OpenClaw to build scalable + secure + auditable agent infrastructure in my platform such that I can build products that other people can use.
bayindirh•10m ago
We had better agent infrastructures (namely JADE) back in the day. I worked with them, and now these things look like flimsy 50¢ plastic toys to me, too.
ZeroGravitas•21s ago
I see the appeal, but I also see the risks.

If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value.

The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes.

That's all great, until it isn't.

Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.

trilogic•39m ago
Great article. Been skeptical of it since the beginning with this Python "Cli" agents. Been looking for local ai driven Agentic GUI that offers real privacy but coulnt find it anywhere. Finally what we call real local and ClI agents pipeline local ai driven with llama.cpp engine is done. Just pure bash and c++, model isolated, no http, no python, no api, no proprietary models. There is the native version (in c++) and the community version in Electron. Is electron Good enough to protect users Wrapping all the rest? This is exciting.
nopurpose•36m ago
I agree that sandboxing whole agent is inadequate: I am fine sharing my github creds with the gh CLI, but not with the npm. More granular sunboxing and permission is what I'd like to see and this project seems interesting enough to have a closer look.

I am not interested in the "claw" workflow, but if I can use it for a safer "code" environment it is a win for me.

electroglyph•36m ago
https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/
falense•10m ago
Very cool project! I am working on something similar myself. I call mine TriOnyx. Its based on Simon Willison's lethal trifecta. You get a star from me :D

https://www.tri-onyx.com/

repelsteeltje•9m ago
One could argue that the discussion is once again about tech debt.

Both OpenClaw and MSDOS gaining a lot a traction by taking short cuts, ignoring decades of lessons learned and delivering now what might have been ready next year. MSDOS (or the QDOS predecessor) was meant to run on "cheap" microcomputer hardware and appeal to tinkerers. OpenClaw is supposed to appeal to YOLO / FOMO sentiments.

And of course, neither will be able to evolve to their eventual real-world context. But for some time (much longer than intended), that's where it will be.

TeMPOraL•4m ago
OpenClaw was an inevitability. An obvious idea that predates LLMs. It took this long for models and pricing to catch up. As much as I dislike this term, if there's one clear example of "Product Model Fit", it's OpenClaw - well, except that arguably what made it truly possible was subscription pricing introduced with Claude Code; before, people were extremely conservative with tokens.

But the point is, OpenClaw is just the first that lucked and got viral. If not for it, something equivalent would. Much like LangChain in the early LLM days.

pointlessone•3m ago
Wow. Much security.

I too remember DOS. Data and code finely blended and perfectly mixed in the same universally accessible block of memory. Oh, wait… single context. nwm

teach•2m ago
This isn't especially related to the article, but when I was at university my first assembler class taught the Motorola 680x0 assembly. I didn't own a computer (most people didn't) but my dorm had a single Mac that you could sign up to use so I did some assignments on that.

Problem is, I was just learning and the mac was running System 7. Which, like MS-DOS, lacked memory protection.

So, one backwards test at the end of your loop and you could -- quite easily -- just overwrite system memory with whatever bytes you like.

I must have hard-locked that computer half a dozen times. Power cycle. Wait for it to slowly reboot off the external 20MB SCSI HDD.

Eventually I took to just printing out the code and tracing through it instead of bothering to run it. Once I could get through the code without any obvious mistakes I'd hazard a "real" execution.

To this day, automatic memory management still feels a little luxurious.

Bun v1.3.13

https://bun.com/blog/bun-v1.3.13
1•Erenay09•31s ago•0 comments

ShannonBase is database agent platform

https://medium.com/@shannon.data.tech/shannonbase-is-databas-agent-platform-2e914ccfc45e
1•shannon-data-ai•6m ago•1 comments

Architecture is all you need (How to think about agentic design)

https://x.com/compose/articles/edit/2046045421844455424
1•Kushal6070•7m ago•0 comments

Kindle E-Readers Released in 2012 or Earlier

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=TRXsYxKJr4WTdsVs2P
1•bandwitch•9m ago•1 comments

The AI-Ready Product Data Framework for B2B Commerce

https://virtocommerce.com/assets/ai-ready-pim-framework
2•lizzieyo•9m ago•0 comments

How (and why) we rewrote our production C++ front end infrastructure in Rust

https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2026/04/17/how-and-why-we-rewrote-our-production-c-frontend-inf...
1•birdculture•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Busybee - a FIFO build queue for multi-agent dev workflows

https://github.com/githappens/busybee
1•playfultones•10m ago•1 comments

WhatsApp Plus is rolling out new premium features

https://wabetainfo.com/whatsapp-plus-is-rolling-out-new-premium-features/
1•fwn•11m ago•0 comments

DuckDB Now Speaks Dutch

https://duckdb.org/2026/04/01/duckdb-now-speaks-dutch
1•saeedesmaili•13m ago•0 comments

Understanding the Go Runtime: The Network Poller

https://internals-for-interns.com/posts/go-netpoller/
1•valyala•14m ago•0 comments

Salesforce Stopped Paying for Salesforcefoundation.org

1•october8140•14m ago•1 comments

Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34866
1•nixass•19m ago•0 comments

Controlling the secondary fan on Minisforum AI Pro HX 370

https://github.com/MiniPcThinker/minisforum_ai_pro_hx_370_aux_fan_controller/blob/main/INVESTIGAT...
1•minipcthinker•19m ago•0 comments

Prediction Markets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN4njIQcSR4
3•Topfi•29m ago•0 comments

File System Wars

https://bytearchitect.io/macos-security/theory/Filesystem-Wars-Why-Your-Choice-of-Storage-is-Actu...
1•rantingdemon•30m ago•0 comments

Email Newsletter Management

https://gemvoyage.net/
1•princesauro•30m ago•0 comments

Bloomberg Terminal is ugly and clunky, but everyone uses it. Even their enemies

https://twitter.com/mb_ghalibaf/status/2045986841220772123
1•haebom•31m ago•0 comments

Neuro-Symbolic Ode Discovery with Latent Grammar Flow

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16232
1•ahsillyme•33m ago•0 comments

ZeusHammer – Built an AI Agent That "Thinks Locally"

https://github.com/pengrambo3-tech/ZeusHammer
1•RamboZeusHammer•34m ago•0 comments

New Debian Project Leader Elected for 2026

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-DPL-Sruthi-Chandran
1•axbyte•36m ago•0 comments

Dentavive Legit or Scam in 2026? ( Hype or Trusted Choice?) [pdf]

https://fsc.org/sites/default/files/webform/problem_with_unacceptable_activi/_sid_/Dentavive1Guid...
1•hauzlapy•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I Recreated Encarta's MindMaze

https://medium.com/@laurentiu.raducu/i-recreated-encartas-mindmaze-and-added-it-to-select-supply-...
3•laurentiurad•37m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Keshro, plan and execute migrations with AI agents

https://keshro.com
1•jlewitt1•42m ago•1 comments

People and AI

https://insurtechamsterdam.com/blog/ai-people-strategy-insurance
1•Venesha•42m ago•0 comments

Authorship and Involuntary Attribution

https://www.prio.org/comments/1156
1•jruohonen•42m ago•0 comments

Harmandeep Singh Kandhari Leading with Vision in a Rising Punjab Investment

https://sites.google.com/view/harmandeep-singh-kandhari
1•KirtiKKapoor•43m ago•0 comments

AI assistants are changing how people buy insurance

https://insurtechamsterdam.com/blog/how-ai-assistants-are-changing-how-people-buy-insurance
2•Venesha•43m ago•1 comments

AEO versus SEO: What is answer engine optimisation (AEO) for insurers?

https://insurtechamsterdam.com/blog/what-is-answer-engine-optimisation-aeo-for-insurers%20-aeo-ve...
2•Venesha•43m ago•0 comments

Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-brussels-launched-age-checking-app-hackers-say-took-them-2-min...
18•axbyte•47m ago•4 comments

Show HN: Free AI image background remover online

https://bgremoval.net/
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