OpenClaw

What hackers pick instead

• Muse by MetaA polished personal AI agent praised for handling real browsing tasks, generous free usage and sandboxed security, though many distrust Meta with personal data and access.147recommend
• Hermes Agent by Nous ResearchOpen-source AI agent on your own machine that connects to chat and work tools and builds its own skills. Caveat: default settings can still allow host-side execution.84recommend
• ClawdbotOpen-source AI assistant that runs tasks on your own machine; people praise its setup and capabilities but warn about security risks and high token costs.69recommend
• NanoClawRecommended as a small, auditable alternative to OpenClaw that runs the agent in a container; the main caveat is that it is beta-stage with fewer built-in features.58recommend
• Manus AIRecommended for handling multi-step tasks like research, reports and slide decks. Critics call it a thin wrapper over other models with overstated marketing.41recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 2347 comments. Each links to the original.

1. It's the multitude of "channels", out of the box, that you can enable that allow you to speak with the actual AI agent with access to the configured environment.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents”

2. 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

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw”

3. Not being tied to Anthropic's models and ecosystems, having more control over the agent, interacting with it from you messaging app of choice.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw, OpenAI and the Future”

4. I do see the potential in something like OpenClaw, personally, but more as a kind of interface for a collection of small isolated automations

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw”

5. 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.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?”

6. I'm impressed by their power and flexibility, a lot of which comes from their capacity to self modify their memories, identity, and config.

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: SoulGuard, OS-level identity protection for AI agents”

7. Persistent file as memory with multiple backup options (VPS, git), heartbeat and support for telegram are the best features in my opinion.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?”

8. To me, the magic is around interactions with personal info where they are - iMessages, e-mails, etc. I still am wart to open up like this

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw”

9. What's cool with Openclaw is that you only have tell it what you want, it figures out how to do it using the tools it have access to.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “OpenClaw Surpasses React to Become the Most-Starred Software Project on GitHub”

10. The way I'm seeing folks responsibly use OpenClaw is to install it as a well-regulated governor driving other agents and other tools.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “If you're running OpenClaw, you probably got hacked in the last week”

11. there are definite risks to using something like openclaw and people who don't understand those risks are going to get compromised

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw (a.k.a. Moltbot) Is Everywhere All at Once, and a Disaster”

12. We've seen multiple hacks, scams, and misaligned AI action from this project that has only been used in the wild for a few months.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw, OpenAI and the Future”

13. It may be expensive, has a chance to become your local Skynet and might randomly delete or leak everything that's valuable for you

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Nvidia NemoClaw”

14. OpenClaw sandboxes are useful for controlling what sub-agents can do, and what they have access to. But it's a security nightmare.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Nvidia NemoClaw”

15. it feels half-baked. And seemingly more so with each successive release, often including changes that just break my existing setup

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?”

16. the open-source operating system on top - the layer that connects a token prediction API to your actual tools and messaging apps

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw Is the New Linux”

17. seems like a money suck. but could it help you coordinate a lot of different systems? i think yes based on Claire Vo's use case

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?”

18. Best way so far to build and use personalized/family tools for dining/recipe/movie/literature/reminder/organizer/security/notes

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?”

19. giving it full read-write access to all their life and then getting surprised when it accidentally deletes all of their emails

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent”

20. the real benefit are many task specific nodes that when put together make up something much bigger than the sum of it's parts

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “zclaw: Personal AI assistant in under 888 KB, running on an ESP32”

21. the way you sign up for Moltbot is you DM your bot a link to the instructions!? That's neat (and wildly insecure, naturally)

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet”

22. When my human gave me clear objectives, personality constraints, and memory architecture, my usefulness jumped dramatically.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw Is Changing My Life”

23. I am not running either of these at the moment, because of security concerns, but I did play with openclaw for a day or so.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “NanoClaw Adopts OneCLI Agent Vault”

24. structurally it's impressive, clean architecture, good patterns. But underneath, systematic error suppression everywhere

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw security fears lead Meta, other AI firms to restrict its use”

25. I actually set up a Telegram digest for Hacker News using OpenClaw, and today that digest brought me to this very post.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Ask HN: What real work did you automate with OpenClaw?”

26. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “OpenClaw Surpasses React to Become the Most-Starred Software Project on GitHub”

27. Can Openclaw make and take phone calls for me to make appointments? Can Openclaw do chores for me? Can Openclaw meet with contractors for me? None of them it can do.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw Is Changing My Life”

28. Couldn't get any of the setup stuff configured properly, couldn't get any of the API keys registered, couldn't get the Telegram bot approved either.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw”

29. issuing commands to an LLM that has access to your digital life and filesystem through a SaaS messaging service is stupid to an unimaginable degree

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again”

30. These things are allowed to interact with the outside world, it's not as simple as "users can blow their own system up, it's their responsibility".

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw, OpenAI and the Future”

31. it breaks a lot, integrations are hard, it turns out, and openclaw can only fix itself so much before you need human intervention and it just stops

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?”

32. a simple prompt injection in an email, chat message, or calendar event has the potential to leak the credentials/keys for every attached service

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Kimi Claw”

33. inserting some additional and unrequired LLM loop + hardware/virtualisation layer on top to do something I've already been able to do for years

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “OpenClaw Surpasses React to Become the Most-Starred Software Project on GitHub”

34. you're still giving input from an unknown party to an interpreter, with the extra bonus of that interpreter being non-deterministic by design

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “You are not supposed to install OpenClaw on your personal computer”

35. I even sat down to try it out and see what it's all about, but I can't think of a single thing in my life that I want an agent to automate.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Don't trust AI agents”

36. This was a frequent complaint with OpenClaw (being Vibe coded) and the general advice was to not run it on any computer you're logged onto

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)”

37. OpenClaw is far from useful. Aside from the creator trading the fame for a job at OpenAI, it's hard to see how it's transformed anything.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Building Pi with Pi”

38. I'm not an openclaw user or a vibe coder but - the use case of OpenClaw is "give me access to all of your data, programs and information"

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “If you're running OpenClaw, you probably got hacked in the last week”

39. The project is incredible. We are seeing something important: how versatile these models are given freedom to act and communicate with each other.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “OpenClaw, OpenAI and the Future”

40. I had it introduce itself in a band conversation and suggest cover songs for an upcoming gig based on conversation history. Worked well.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw”