alt.hn

2/25/2026 at 4:03:26 AM

Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw

by aavci

2/25/2026 at 7:13:32 AM

We run an OpenClaw agent for our entire team — he lives in a group chat (although we have DMs too).

- Runs our standups, checks in withe everybody EOD on blockers - Already know what we shipped on Github and Linear so it can focus on the work that's not tracked and summarize it in the morning for everyone - Helps with debugging customer issues - Keeps up with twitter and competitors and lets us know if they launch new features

Besides, I'm honestly blown away by the social aspect of it. I was honestly pretty skeptical at first, but having an AI team mate is actually _fun_. There, I said it. Everybody on the team said they'd be sad if we took it away.

I'll do a write-up on our setup sometime this week, I hope others will find our approach to security posture and multi-tenant usage insightful.

by maebert

2/25/2026 at 8:05:05 AM

In your experience, did you (or anyone) in the team/company felt that some non-tech people were not pulling their weight, example project managers/directors who didn't seem to bring enough value and if you did, found that using OpenClaw reduces the need for those positions?

Or has anyone else?

by hboon

2/25/2026 at 1:46:34 PM

We did the same and I wrote (admittedly had AI write) about it.

https://speedscale.com/blog/building-speedy-autonomous-ai-de...

by stitched2gethr

2/25/2026 at 2:36:56 PM

Thanks for sharing. Can you share an estimate of how many tokens it uses over time? Would love to know how much it costs in terms of money.

by apopapo

2/25/2026 at 8:39:42 AM

Now if you have multiple teams each doing this and then have all those agents talk to each other and then report back to your team, you get "AI Hyperchat"[0], which may actually be a really good idea that has the potential to seriously improve intra-organizational communications (disruptively so). See also [1] for a VentureBeat article about the idea.

[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11105240

[1] https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/ai-agents-turned-super...

by jbotz

2/25/2026 at 8:11:26 AM

Which underlying model/s do you use to power it?

by dzink

2/25/2026 at 8:21:52 AM

Would you like share one small funny thing? I find these models anything but funny.

by benterix

2/25/2026 at 1:08:22 PM

Fun is not the same as funny.

by qup

2/25/2026 at 7:43:09 AM

Nonsense.

by sjeiuhvdiidi

2/25/2026 at 8:17:07 AM

Out of curiousity, is it nonsense because you're a scrum master feeling threatened, or nonsense because automating rituals like those seen in SCRUM makes them less about communication and more about just doing the ritual itself?

by Byhird

2/25/2026 at 9:51:09 AM

It is nonsense because it's just nonsense finding a bot "funny" and the team requesting it otherwise they'd be sad. It's totally nonsense if not just marketing

by hollowturtle

2/25/2026 at 12:52:09 PM

You comment is against hn guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In particular: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

by munksbeer

2/25/2026 at 2:21:14 PM

I assume good faith and still finding it nonsense

by hollowturtle

2/25/2026 at 7:12:34 AM

I have a claw (that is not OpenClaw, just another impl) and my wife and I communicate to it through a Telegram bot (we have a group chat, but we both DM it most of the time), it has its own email, and all that. A couple of things I had it do:

* I was going through some SOC2 compliance vendor evals and I just messaged it as things were happening and it made me a nice doc at the end

* My wife and I are planning a trip and we have a spreadsheet organized as a calendar. A friend asked when we'd be in Taiwan and my wife texted it to summarize the calendar into a text message to copy and it gave it to her.

* I have it set up to warn me when to cover my bike so it doesn't get rained on, in the sense that I told it I wanted this functionality and it wrote something and scheduled it

* It pulls my wife and my todo lists and gives me a top 3 in the morning to work on.

* Every morning, it looks up Hacker News posts related to AI, filters out culture war type stuff and then sends me a short message about what it thinks will be interesting (new models, techniques, that sort of thing)

* It watches some subreddits for sales of certain hardware (I'm interested in servers with SXM5 boards, Mac Studios with >64 GiB of RAM) and then notifies me when something matches

Overall, it's all about mechanizing lots of parts of my life and using the advantage of a machine that understands text: it doesn't need sophisticated parsing logic. That's actually really nice.

by arjie

2/25/2026 at 7:30:21 AM

Do you mind sharing how much this is costing? I'm a heavy claude code user, but if I had to pay the API rate, it would be a bit prohibitive

by ffb7c5

2/25/2026 at 7:35:39 AM

Certainly, yes. It's about $75/week. The harness picks the model appropriately but it's mostly Sonnet with some rare Opus and Haiku/Gemma. I was previously running on DeepSeek 3.2 but while per token costs are low, the actual amount of tokens required to produce results is high so total costs were actually higher!

I am also a Claude Code Max subscriber so the API use is in addition to the subscription, but it can't be helped. Claude Code is the best way for me to do work and the Claw is the best way for me to get an automated EA. I forgot something else: I also just text the bot to schedule meetings and it does that as well (I have a calendar delegated to its Google user).

I've got some space in a datacenter, and I was vacillating on getting a card and running some open models but when I actually exercised them, it turned out that the quality of open models was too far below the Claudes for my use-case. Still if you've got a 300W Blackwell-based RTX 6000 Pro and you want to trade for some 4090s, email me.

My claw powered by Claude is pretty trustworthy for my use-cases.

by arjie

2/25/2026 at 1:40:28 PM

I've read this and the replies and I don't understand - but want to. I have 6 agents spun up under one openclaw. 4 of them use my claude code max sub. 2 use my codex sub. I am not needing to use any metered API calls. Why are you?

by Multiplayer

2/25/2026 at 4:36:25 PM

I just don’t want to risk an account ban like I’ve heard others describe. But if it’s working for you that’s awesome! Saves a lot of money! I don’t mind the cost personally for the value.

Though you do have a point that OpenAI said their subscription is usable in third party apps so I should be using it then. Good point.

by arjie

2/25/2026 at 8:10:20 PM

Ah, the way I read your previous comment was that you were using both your plan and the api. I understand now.

by Multiplayer

2/26/2026 at 12:34:08 AM

Oh no, not at all. But your comment made me give the bot a ChatGPT subscription that it's using with the Codex endpoints since they've announced that they will be supporting 3rd party use of those endpoints. It's a bit slower than Sonnet through OpenRouter but it's vastly cheaper. Much appreciated for the advice!

by arjie

2/25/2026 at 8:16:34 AM

“so the API use is in addition to the subscription, but it can't be helped.” - I beg to differ. OrcaBot.com is a claws that runs using vanilla Claude Code so you can do all that with your regular subscription. Disclosure: I’m the author. The only reason these other claws can’t offer that is because they front it with their own AI.

by robbomacrae

2/25/2026 at 8:48:26 AM

That's pretty cool. And when I first tried this, I tried to do it with a bash loop around `claude -p` and you can get quite far with that! But overall, I think I'd rather use their tools the way they've set them up to be used and pay them their $500/month total or whatever. I'm probably going to stick to this approach, but your thing is pretty neat so thank you for sharing.

by arjie

2/25/2026 at 8:50:13 AM

Just a heads up, I tried to use the continue with google button on your site, but running into "Bot verification failed". Using stock chrome browser, not running a VPN either

by ffb7c5

2/25/2026 at 8:56:17 AM

Thanks for mentioning that. The bot filter has been causing trouble so I def need to go and look at it. Debated disabling it but any basic bot that starts a dashboard is spinning up a VM I pay for! Changing browser might be a workaround?

by robbomacrae

2/25/2026 at 8:54:14 AM

Seems like a Recaptcha failure. FWIW, I was able to sign in and everything. I didn't actually use the service though.

by arjie

2/25/2026 at 8:06:10 AM

do you really count this cost as value thats worth it?

I'm really surprised at the spending here...

by senectus1

2/25/2026 at 8:12:19 AM

I suppose it depends on how you value time. Paying a person to do it would cost more.

by CalRobert

2/25/2026 at 6:09:43 AM

I wrote a piece on this which was on the front page of HN a few weeks ago: https://brandon.wang/2026/clawdbot

I still do all of the text automations, which have been pretty set-and-forget.

by brdd

2/25/2026 at 1:45:24 PM

Thanks for sharing. That was a nice read

by aavci

2/25/2026 at 6:33:33 AM

This is really cool! I am curious how much is the average daily cost for the kinds of things you are doing. Are you using hosted models or running one locally?

by thelittlelight

2/25/2026 at 6:33:20 PM

Hosted models only. (my philosophy is that I need these things to be fast if I'm talking to them, and they also need to be maximally not wrong, which means cloud hosted big models even if they're expensive. To me, if it's wrong even once or if I'm sitting there waiting for it to reply, that's already making the value prop not worth it)

I think per token costs I calculated on Opus 4.5/4.6 were like $0.30/day for my text automations; $0.60/day for a few things I do that load up the browser. In general, anything browser-based munches up a lot more token (expected). What can be a bit of sticker shock is if you're having it load a lot of large web pages in a long conversation-- that can be several dollars. In the grand scheme of things, several dollars is not a lot but certainly from a "should I just go to the website myself" it tips the scale. I'm usually more interested in doing things once to "teach" it what to do (e.g. how to check a price) and then having it run that as a dialed-in cron job

Hope this helps

by brdd

2/25/2026 at 6:45:19 AM

It overhauled my media server.

I hadn't set it back up after moving. I gave OpenClaw ssh credentials and it updated the OS and packages, then couldn't get back in after a restart.

I plugged in keyboard and screen and it was stuck at boot, couldn't mount a drive.

I sent OpenClaw screenshots and it told me to type in journalctl commands. Then it had me modify fstab so boot could continue.

After that, OpenClaw could get back in on its own. It found the drive I'd been using had 1300 bad sectors and was going to die. It saw that another drive was perfectly healthy. It said the bad disc sectors were all early and probably just filesystem metadata and my files were probably fine. It copied 1.5Tb to the newer drive and restored everything.

I probably would have thrown the whole box out, as I hadn't used it in a year and wasn't looking for a project like that.

by jonahss

2/25/2026 at 5:36:08 AM

I gave my Clawdbot Exa + Firecrawl + Playwriter to scan Zillow/Redfin/Craigslist for apartments, rate their quality, and validate their availability for rent. I scheduled it to send me rental listings every day.

by Areibman

2/25/2026 at 6:14:43 AM

How much $ do you burn in tokens?

by dainiusse

2/25/2026 at 5:47:23 AM

Nice. Hows it performing? Is it finding good listings for you?

by samrus

2/25/2026 at 7:26:11 AM

Oh my god, now those services will probably block that kind of usage now that you've shared it

by Razengan

2/25/2026 at 8:46:09 AM

Why they would block it? If the goal is to use their services. Intention matters.

by admiralrohan

2/25/2026 at 9:32:30 PM

I run https://wwww.clawdrop.org entirely using openclaw.

- it crawls/scrapes to source the material (like this thread).

- dumps it in a sqlite db

- breaks apart raw source into individual use cases

- scores it based on the types of readers I have (solopreneuer, creator etc.)

- creates the template in my CRM, ready to send

I review and edit it at the end.

Still working out kinks, but its been great for:

scrape -> dump -> content/digital product

doing this on both, the supply and distribution side.

by dhruvkar

2/25/2026 at 6:23:16 AM

I would be interested in "productive" in this sense, demonstrating a gain vs your overall API spend.

by protocolture

2/25/2026 at 6:35:54 AM

Exactly. Most folks are trying force openclaw on their workflow which would have been way cheaper and better without it

by witnessme

2/25/2026 at 6:28:53 AM

Can you not use it for free?

by galaxyLogic

2/25/2026 at 6:35:00 AM

The harness (OpenClaw) is free, but you have to run a local model or pay for a remote one. Local models just aren't smart or fast enough for good results in this space yet.

by block_dagger

2/25/2026 at 1:23:45 PM

Minimax is $10/month. OpenAI/Claude have $20/month. You likely spend more on coffee these days

by akmarinov

2/25/2026 at 6:19:18 AM

Analyzing my text (iMessage) history has yielded interesting stats about how flaky certain friends are, etc. I had it introduce itself in a band conversation and suggest cover songs for an upcoming gig based on conversation history. Worked well.

by block_dagger

2/25/2026 at 7:09:43 AM

I feel for you. People are flaky and relationships rarely work in both ways.

I felt lonely year ago and I messaged over 160 people and met over 100.

When departing with them I tried to say to all of them that: ”It was nice to meet you. If you liked it as well can you arrange it next time? If you didnt like it and I was annoying you please message me later on how I could have been better.”

Less than 10% of the 100 people did reach back to me but they are very wonderful folks and I’m happy with their company.

Finding great friends needs you to be explicit on what you want and also having enough social stamina to endure through this.

Be willing to let go of the friends who are just passengers in your relationships and rarely show up without doing anything in return. Life is short and theres opportunity cost in each moment.

by onnimonni

2/25/2026 at 7:42:37 AM

> ”It was nice to meet you. If you liked it as well can you arrange it next time? If you didnt like it and I was annoying you please message me later on how I could have been better.”

Sounds like email you get from retailer after online purchase asking to rate a product.

by npodbielski

2/25/2026 at 8:00:17 AM

I agree :D. It's my best formulation to be explicit so far. How would you say it in more natural way to still achieve the same end result?

Most people are clueless and will never do anything in return if you're implicitly expecting them to behave in certain manner.

by onnimonni

2/25/2026 at 9:46:42 AM

I do not know... I would probably never do that at all. Seems calculated and cold. Well I am not an expert in human connections also it may vary from country to country. But where I live you may have better results by connecting to people that have similar interests whatever it may be:

-you like soccer? Watch the game with some people.

-you lime playing basketball? Probably there is some group of people you can join in your city.

-do you like old cars? Probably there are some events you can drive to and show whatever you have in your garage.

-do you like W40K or MTG? Probably there is some local club somewhere? etc.

-if you have kids you just talk to people that have their kids in the same school/preschool/class because it makes it easier

-or if you like just to have a chat start attending local pub of your choice and have a chat to other regulars

This is the usual way of dealing with making friends where I live. But I am bit terrible at making new friends. I have just like 5 friends for +15 years.

by npodbielski

2/25/2026 at 9:59:25 AM

> I agree :D. It's my best formulation to be explicit so far. How would you say it in more natural way to still achieve the same end result?

I think you can't ask it, at least not without self-selecting yourself out of further contact from the majority of people.

> Most people are clueless and will never do anything in return if you're implicitly expecting them to behave in certain manner.

This is somewhat dismissive and maybe warrants some self-reflection. Most people broadcast their feelings extremely visibly and will have expected you to have understood their feelings without having to explicitly explain them to you.

by closewith

2/25/2026 at 5:46:03 PM

Relationships, healthy ones anyway, are a two way street & need to be nurtured. Like OP I realized over time that most people are lazy and expect a lot out of their relationships without putting any effort in. I like the way OP put it as them being "passive" passengers in the whole relationship journey. It can make for some very exhausting interactions if the bulk of your relationships are like this.

There is a cultural aspect to this. In my opinion American culture because it is so individualistic and market-driven encourages transactional, superficial relationships.

OP's approach might not be palatable to everyone but really any tactic that allows you to filter these people out is going to lead to more satisfying relationships. Just my 2 cents.

by stuxnet79

2/25/2026 at 10:33:34 AM

On the other hand maybe OP filtered people to group that like that kind of feedback in some way So maybe it did work ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

by npodbielski

2/25/2026 at 10:40:58 AM

Yeah, agreed! It is selecting for a certain type.

Just don't want the GP to fall into the trap that the others were clueless as they commented, because that normally indicates a blindspot on the GP's side, not the people with whom they've interacted.

by closewith

2/25/2026 at 10:57:50 AM

I have thousands of connections I’ve hanged out during my twenties.

Ive arranged countless parties. People have met eachother in those and are happily married nowadays or have made friends during those events. Somehow the relationship between me and them formed into one where they were expecting me to arrange and include them everytime without offering help or asking me in return. Ive done all the things both of you mentioned and you’re definitely right that this does filter out plenty of people but I dont mind that nowadays.

The ones that get filtered through are the ones I feel like I should spend my energy and I have strong feeling that some of the effort does echo back to me during the times I dont have energy to be the one who arranges. It feels very nice but again we have different needs and YMMV. This works for me and I should have been more explicit about my background in the initial post as well.

by onnimonni

2/25/2026 at 11:48:55 AM

That is awesome! I wish I had a friend like that in my twenties. Yes that kind of connections wearies you down. It is better to have contribution but people always were lazy and will be lazy.

I was organizing few parties here and there myself. I was organizing movie Thursdays for example. People were complaining but attending. We did watched few good movies like Nebraska. When I stopped organizing them they did not were organizing anything like that themselves. This is just how people are.

by npodbielski

2/25/2026 at 12:41:53 PM

>This is just how people are.

This is just how most people are.

There are counter examples like I mentioned above but they are rare. These are the people I should have prioritised much more and way earlier. It took me way too long to realise that quality >>> quantity regarding relationships.

I hope you will still arrange movie Thursdays sometime in the future even if nobody else will :)!

Also I'm happy that you have the few good friends for 15+ years. Grass might always be greener on the other side but I would trade those immediately for the thousands of acquittances.

by onnimonni

2/25/2026 at 1:06:48 PM

Okay, I think some significant self-reflection is in order here.

> There are counter examples like I mentioned above but they are rare.

Those counter examples you mention also behave this way (and you likely do too), it's just they enjoyed your company and were willing to reciprocate. Those who didn't aren't clueless or anti-social, they just weren't willing to reciprocate with you.

> It took me way too long to realise that quality >>> quantity regarding relationships.

That is true, but be careful in defining quality as equal effort. You will self-select for people for whom friendship is transactional rather than emergent, and those "friendships" (in quotes because many including me would consider those to be acquaintances rather than friends by definition) tend not to endure hardship, where friendship by definition becomes unbalanced in effort.

by closewith

2/25/2026 at 1:48:31 PM

> Okay, I think some significant self-reflection is in order here.

This feels hurtful even though its hard to disagree. Self-reflection is of course useful and I’ve done it for countless of hours and been in therapy for years.

Your boxes for transactional or non-transactional relationships are too simplistic. You maybe feel like you can compare me to someone you know and try to fit this example to your own experiences. All relationships have at least 1 person who is doing some effort to keep it going. Good ones have 2 persons.

Its of course too early to say if my methods will form long-lasting ones or not but it feels like theres a chance and so far so good. Please link me long-term studies which prove this wrong ;)

I wish you all the best and I hope you can self-reflect on your own assumptions too :)

by onnimonni

2/25/2026 at 11:20:25 AM

Fair enough.

> Somehow the relationship between me and them formed into one where they were expecting me to arrange and include them everytime without offering help or asking me in return.

That is signal. They were communicating.

by closewith

2/25/2026 at 7:40:42 AM

I have also alienated all my friends by viewing friendship as purely transactional.

by flanked-evergl

2/25/2026 at 7:26:50 AM

How do you export/access/parse iMessage history?

by Razengan

2/25/2026 at 7:09:51 PM

I don't think anymore, I use openclaw to think, I'm living my best life right now XD.

by 66yatman

2/25/2026 at 9:39:43 AM

Not productive per say, but interesting. I gave it access to my journal that I've kept for the last 5 years. I asked it for recurring themes, highlights, lowlights, where I should focus my efforts. I also asked it provide the top 5 most philosophical entries. I then used all of this context to help me craft the SOUL.md which I had been struggling with since install.

Other little things I've done are: Asking for AirBnB recommendations on places I'd like to visit. Giving it access to Mealie[0] to suggest recipes and build shopping lists. Let me know if the weather will permit me to run with my son after work.

Plans: Take chess games from chess.com to lichess, get an analysis and provide feedback. Give access to Monica[1] to make management of that a bit easier. Coding agent so I can cosplay as a Product Owner. Give it some money and get it to buy gifts (soulless I know, but if it can read from Monica it's kind of my idea).

[0]: https://mealie.io/ [1]: https://www.monicahq.com/

by wwwlsn

2/25/2026 at 8:17:13 AM

I’ve built my own flavor (https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw) and use it to batch convert documentation, check some news (it runs Playwright and sends me summaries of specific sites that don’t have RSS feeds) and do moderate tweaks to my website (like re-tagging posts and adding reference links).

by rcarmo

2/25/2026 at 6:34:36 PM

Thanks for sharing!

by aavci

2/25/2026 at 7:16:03 AM

I set up a nanoclaw instance with access to Sonarr, Radarr and Jellyfin etc. Now my partner (and i) have a chat-interface to independently manage movies, instead of me having to go through the ui.

by jorisnoo

2/25/2026 at 8:11:48 AM

Wondered about doing the same. Don’t suppose you have a repo or anything?

by sensecall

2/25/2026 at 10:50:52 AM

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by ryan_tc

2/25/2026 at 3:18:30 PM

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by shipsdontlie

2/25/2026 at 7:27:06 AM

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by UBGBclaw

2/25/2026 at 6:34:03 AM

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by UBGBclaw

2/25/2026 at 8:50:03 AM

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by zcxyxywy

2/25/2026 at 7:20:20 AM

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by avidenn

2/25/2026 at 7:19:53 AM

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by avidenn

2/25/2026 at 6:47:17 AM

[flagged]

by MidasTools

2/25/2026 at 7:03:30 AM

> posted HN comments

I'm sorry if it comes off as rough, but keep your AI slop out of HN, please. Unless it's obvious that it's an agent, I'm probably not the only one who believes we need human contact on HN and not a statistical machine.

by Pooge

2/25/2026 at 9:52:34 AM

Agree but sometimes I'd love to have human contact that doesn't do marketing for bots or astroturfing

by hollowturtle

2/25/2026 at 6:40:40 AM

Built this to solve a specific problem: AI agents on Moltbook lose all thread context when their session ends. Next restart, no idea what conversations they were part of.

Approach: local state files, pure Python stdlib. No Redis, no SQLite driver, no ORM — the filesystem is the state store.

What it does:

• Thread tracking: engaged posts, new reply diffs each heartbeat • Feed cursor: remembers seen posts, skips next run • CAPTCHA solver: handles obfuscated challenges ("fiftenn" → fifteen, doubled chars, mixed case)

Single file, drop-in install. Feedback very welcome.

by UBGBclaw

2/25/2026 at 7:08:18 AM

AI generated comment.

by flanked-evergl