Two decades! It will be 20 this April.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS)

Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts.

But you’re right, OpenClaw seems to be another fad being used mostly by “influencers” and “thought leaders” to show how awesome and productive they are at… Writing blog posts about being productive. It’s the LinkedInification of the web. What matters is the signal that you use the tool, not that it does something truly useful.

Once you get the dopamine hit of having an ai assistant do something in the real world it becomes an hammer you want to use on everything

Instead of being a problem solver you start to become a problem hunter, and you invent them in order to solve them

While I think that OpenClaw is silly, I don't think that's a good argument. You like Discord? Well, you could have done it with IRC. Like Rust? Nothing you couldn't have done in assembly. AWS? Just set up your own server!

Yes, many people are using OpenClaw to do "old" things in ways that are probably more expensive and less reliable, but if they wouldn't be doing it without OpenClaw, you can't argue with the results. The only question is if these results are good. That part isn't clear-cut to me. There's plenty of AI enthusiasts who talk about how AI is changing their life and how they're writing 10,000 lines of code per hour and shipping killer apps, but you never get to see what these killer apps are.

I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store.

I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.

It's not you being a curmudgeon.

The stuff you've listed are the kinds of things smart home enthusiasts do with whatever tools are available to them, and are just a sign of people exploring the possibility space.

I've posted about this before, I call it the Jarvis effect.

> For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing. You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future, that was sci-fi, it was awesome.

> But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only time people use voice controls is when they can't use other controls, i.e. while driving. Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. There's a reason every society on the planet shifted from primarily phone calls to texting once the technology was available!

By and large the reason people love Openclaw is that it feels cool and futuristic. You have an AGENT! It's DOING THINGS! Yes it's doing things you could have easily done yourself, but you're not doing them yourself, you have an AGENT! It's all very silly, the same way that having your lights controlled by your phone is very silly, but some people like it.

That being said there a real use case for Openclaw, which is "marketing" (aka spam). A ton of people have set up Openclaw agents which exist to post on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/any open public user discussion forum (yes, HN included) to seem like a real member of a community, then start advertising something, generally crypto. So we can thank Openclaw for dead internet accelerationism.

I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them.

I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.

For example, I've never heard of Automator. I'm familiar with Zapier, I'll have to evaluate the two situations, then I'll find out that might need to find an alternative that runs on Linux and then I'll have to check if....

These are all simple steps but they all use a non-trivial amount of time for the problem their solving

The other thing is the

Eg. tell it to book a flight ticket for X without dealing with "modern UX" and 1GB websites

But could you estimate the token cost of this? Or were you able to comfortably do this with a subscription plan?

You're joking right?

React popularity is also a phenomenon closely tied to popularity of the fb

I set it up, and had it do a few things, then decided its too risky after seeing some of the drastic failures it had caused some people.

Sure I understand you can sandbox it and all, but even then I couldn't think of much stuff I wouldn't want to do myself just nor justify the cost to run it.

It's neat but the token use is pretty inefficient and security of course is a mess but it's been fun to play with.

I am messing with NanoClaw now and it's pretty much the same but only support Claude (uses code to do everything)

This is the lowest, most boring form of programming.