I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them?
It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?
I don't use OpenClaw, but rather Hermes. I have a set schedule that kicks off Hermes to scan my home network for anything out of sorts, and generate a summary that it sends to me via SimpleX. For this, Hermes uses tools such as nmap, etc (it decided which tools were best).
I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.
I wouldn't trust it with a credit card, or really any sort of non-reversable decision making. Most of what I do outside of work either requires physical interaction, or is something I do for fun. For now, I assume that is what people use this stuff for. Fun.
"hey computer, i want to watch a movie on my jellyfin server tonight, get it done" and openclaw autonomously finds the torrent, downloads it, moves it to the NAS, and you sit down at the end of the day with everhything set up
It was first, but it's like Langchain built tools first. Nowadays, everyone's got a better assistant. Grok's looks like the most exciting, though I just have a custom built one. Has a headed browser when it wants and everything that I can pop into from my phone. It's so easy to write this kind of software it's a waste to pay someone for it.
This was useful for the 1-2 months where models were good enough to use all their newfound tools but not good enough to vibe code them themselves.
Now, just install codex (or claude code or whatever) on a vps, tell it to make a way to email it, then email it to make a way to text it etc etc. takes a few minutes and when you need another bridge just have codex make it.
I think what changed is that coding agents adopted some of the features from Openclaw, eg the ability to access it remotely and for one Claude Code instance to “talk” to another, etc.
I'm fairly sure you can vibecode all these things, but given the state of agent produced code at the moment, I would suspect that your email and sms gate will have horrible security holes.
It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?
I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.
I assume they're using agents to sort through all the slop?
Now, just install codex (or claude code or whatever) on a vps, tell it to make a way to email it, then email it to make a way to text it etc etc. takes a few minutes and when you need another bridge just have codex make it.