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Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw

105 points| aavci | 4 days ago

What are some very productive things you achieved with OpenClaw that you wouldn’t mind sharing?

86 comments

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maebert|4 days ago

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.

hboon|4 days ago

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?

dzink|4 days ago

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

benterix|4 days ago

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

d342|4 days ago

oh thats interesting, are you getting him to scrape twitter?

arjie|4 days ago

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.

ffb7c5|4 days ago

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

slake|3 days ago

Funnily it seems you were already more organized than I am today before you had the *Claw. That's why you were able to transition to it as a 'life operating system'.

I have too much stuff in my head and nothing written down and that's beginning to be a hindrance to the transition.

swah|2 days ago

Do you keep wondering if "a simple python bot could do this" ?

lzy|3 days ago

May I know which claw are you using and why?

brdd|4 days ago

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.

aavci|4 days ago

Thanks for sharing. That was a nice read

thelittlelight|4 days ago

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?

Areibman|4 days ago

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.

dainiusse|4 days ago

How much $ do you burn in tokens?

samrus|4 days ago

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

Razengan|4 days ago

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

jonahss|4 days ago

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.

thisismyswamp|1 day ago

I built a way for my agent to call me on a real phone: https://clawr.ing

I thought it would be cool to have it reach me proactively when something I care about happens instead of having to look for a notification or ask it directly

The result is pretty surreal, being out for a workout or groceries or something and getting a call about a stock price or an important email feels like I was suddenly transported into the future

It took quite a bit of effort to set up though, there’s a lot of complexity to routing calls in a cost efficient manner and generating realistic human like speech

I’m happy with the result though, you can reply back and the agent can run any tool call while it’s on the call with you, and if it takes a bit of time as in for a web search or so it will put you on hold and you will hear hold music for a few moments

protocolture|4 days ago

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

witnessme|4 days ago

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

galaxyLogic|4 days ago

Can you not use it for free?

block_dagger|4 days ago

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.

onnimonni|4 days ago

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.

flanked-evergl|4 days ago

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

Razengan|4 days ago

How do you export/access/parse iMessage history?

dhruvkar|4 days ago

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.

wwwlsn|4 days ago

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/

ildar|2 days ago

We run an OpenClaw agent for marketing, content, and project management — blog posts, social media, GitHub engagement, website updates, email monitoring. It is genuinely productive in ways that surprised me.

But after reading the SecurityScorecard report this week (40,000+ exposed instances, 63% vulnerable), we got serious about the security side.

Our setup that balances productivity with safety:

1. Dedicated machine (not the daily driver laptop). Agent runs 24/7 on a separate device with sleep disabled.

2. Permission tiers — the agent operates at "worker" level by default. It can read files, run safe commands (git, npm, curl), and browse the web. But it cannot touch SSH keys, AWS credentials, or browser password stores without explicit elevation.

3. Skill auditing — every skill gets scanned before installation. We found that roughly 20% of ClawHub skills have suspicious patterns (consistent with what Clawned.io is reporting).

4. Audit logging — every file access, command execution, and network request gets logged. This saved us once when a skill was making unexpected outbound connections.

5. Network egress monitoring — we track what domains the agent contacts. Unexpected destinations get flagged immediately.

The $75/week cost mentioned by another commenter is in line with our experience on Opus. The security overhead (running ClawMoat for monitoring) adds essentially zero — it is a pure Node.js library with no external dependencies.

The key insight: you do not have to choose between productivity and security. You just need a monitoring layer that watches what the agent actually does, not just what it promises to do.

stevenhubertron|2 days ago

Are we just allowing AI replies to a post about AI now?

jorisnoo|4 days ago

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.

sensecall|4 days ago

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

sinzin91|2 days ago

I have a slack workspace with claws running on different models (opus, codex, Gemini). The use cases are too long to enumerate but this goes way beyond just EA for me.

rcarmo|4 days ago

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).

aavci|4 days ago

Thanks for sharing!

66yatman|4 days ago

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

nalinm|2 days ago

It’s actively selling my dad’s car on NextDoor. Fielding inquiries and negotiating. Pretty fun.

MidasTools|4 days ago

[deleted]

Pooge|4 days ago

> 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.

UBGBclaw|4 days ago

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.