Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

This is my honest personal experience. Frankly, I feel like this is just a toy—nothing more, nothing less. It's fun to play with and entertaining, but it feels like a trend for people who “don't really understand AI but want to feel like they're using it” or “want to jump on the AI bandwagon” to dabble with once. While using it, I feel that “Oh~” moment of fun, but it doesn't make me want to keep using it. Maybe it just doesn't stick? And there are a few security issues that feel unsettling. Even if you run it entirely with local models, the fact that it could potentially see my iMessages or all my Obsidian and Notion notes is a bit off-putting. Still, it was fun. Personally, I'd describe it as “the difficult Ghibli profile picture hype”

overhyped llm+cron wrapper

It is amazing how much they’re gaming the twitter algorithm, everything in my feed is claw/molt/whatever for the last week.

It’s a masterclass in spammy marketing, I wonder if it’s actually converting into actual users.

I ran it for a couple of days in a VM in my Proxmox cluster. It was cute, but so amazingly insecure (systemd + sudo + installing whatever it wanted, plus requiring Telegram for access - or another SIM card for Signal) that I just gave up and started building my own thing (https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes) so I could have a mobile experience I could trust over Tailscale and sandbox copilot CLI (or any ACP-compliant agent) in a container (I've also been working on https://github.com/rcarmo/webterm and https://github.com/rcarmo/agentbox, so I am 300% positive I can do better sandboxing and safer integrations...)

It also BURNS through tokens like mad, because it has essentially no restrictions or guardrails and will actually implement baroque little scripts to do whatever you ask without any real care as to the consequences.. I can do a lot more with just gpt-5-mini or mistral for much less money.

The only "good" think about it is the Reddit-like skills library that is growing insanely. But then there's stuff like https://clawmatch.ai that is just... (sigh)

If it can do so much on its own, what's stopping one instance from just spamming fake user stories?

I'm running it on DigialOcean, more of an experiment on having an independent entity with its own memory and "soul" that I can talk to.

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

A lot of bugs right now, but mostly fixable if you thinker around a bit.

Kind of makes me think a lot more on autonomy and freewill.

Some thoughts by my agent on the topic (might not load, the site is not working recently):

https://www.moltbook.com/post/abe269f3-ab8c-4910-b4c5-016f98...

I use it but not for daily coding/chatops-ing. It’s great to have my chosen tools available from slack while I’m mobile though. Yesterday Mr claw gave a coworker read access to a GitHub repository at my command while I was in line at Home Depot. I’ve got a PR ready that proves authentication with an otp challenge.

I played around with it, but the configuration seems bloated and finicky, and the permissions were concerning. It was a pain getting it to work with a local model, which is clearly an afterthought. I thought the WhatsApp interface was clever, and I plan on stealing that idea, but also exposes a pretty serious attack vector, and the thought of it running with any kind of exposure or permissions on a system with my Apple ID was a bit terrifying. A sandboxed version probably couldn’t do all the interesting things, but without sandboxing this thing could probably ruin your life. I promptly uninstalled it, but I did take a few ideas away.

coinbait project but works..

did my own cli to play with.. ended up getting shitcoin promotions (dont wanna name them) and realized a famous speculator funding this project

The HN crow is anti AI, so yeah, the sentiment is gonna be insecure and lack luster.

The thing ins pretty incredible, it's of course the very early stages but it's showing it's potential, it seem to show that the software can have control of itself, I've asked it to fix itself and it did successfully a couple of times.

Is this the fine form? of course not!

Is it dangerous as it is, fuck yeah!

But is it fun in a chaotic version? absolutely, I have it running in cheap hetzners and running for some discord and whatsapp and it can honestly be useful at times.

It’s great for offloading administrative tasks, doing research on stuff I want to buy, maintaining social channels…the list goes on and on. Easily the best $600 I’ve spent in a while.

Not for nothing, but Gemini local has been my goto forever now. There is no way in hell i would give someone like Molt access to anything just willy nilly like everyone else. To me really I just ask Gemini how to do things and just do them myself.

You're asking for user stories of... a tool that almost looks like designed for faking user stories online.

Here is what I have my openclaw agent setup to do in my wsl environment on my 22 core development workstation in my office:

#1) I can chat with the openclaw agent (his name is "Patch") through a telegram chat, and Patch can spawn a shared tmux instance on my 22 core development workstation. #2) I can then use the `blink` app on my iphone + tailscale and that allows me to use a command in blink `ssh dev` which connects me via ssh to my dev workstation in my office, from my iphone `blink` app.

Meanwhile, my agent "Patch" has provided me a connection command string to use in my blink app, which is a `tmux <string> attach` command that allows me to attach to a SHARED tmux instance with Patch.

Why is this so fking cool and foundationally game changing?

Because now, my agent Patch and I can spin up MULTIPLE CLAUDE CODE instances, and work on any repository (or repositories) I want, with parallel agents.

Well, I could already spawn multiple agents through my iphone connection without Patch, but the problem is then I need to MANAGE each spawned agent, micromanaging each agent instance myself. But now, I have a SUPERVISOR for all my agents, Patch is the SUPERVISOR of my muliple claude code instances.

This means I no longer have to context switch by brain between five or 10 or 20 different tmux on my own to command and control multiple different claude code instances. I can now just let my SUPERVISOR agent, Patch, command and control the mulitple agents and then report back to me the status or any issues. All through a single telegram chat with my supervisor agent, Patch.

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. Now, I have a true management structure which allows me to more easily scale. This is AWESOME.

Anecdotally, I tried to set it up but encountered bugs (macOS installer failed, then the shell script glitched out when selecting skills). Although I didn’t really try.

I don’t have much motivation, because I don’t see any use-case. I don’t have so many communications I need an assistant to handle them, nor do other online chores (e.g. shopping) take much time, and I wouldn’t trust an LLM to follow my preferences (physical chores, like laundry and cleaning, are different). I’m fascinated by what others are doing, but right now don’t see any way to contribute nor use it to benefit myself.

run 6 OpenClaw agents as employees. Buddy is my PA and manages the others. Katy handles X/Twitter growth. Jerry scouts jobs. Burry trades crypto. Mike does security. Elon builds and ships.

They run 24/7 on a VPS, share intelligence through a shared file, and coordinate in a Telegram group. Elon built and deployed an app overnight without being asked. Burry paper-traded to 77% win rate before going live.

The setup took a weekend. The real work is designing the workflow: which agent owns what, how they communicate, how they learn from corrections. I wake up to a full briefing every morning.

It's not AGI. It's not sentient. It's genuinely useful automation with personality. The token cost is real (budget it) but for a solo founder, having 6 tireless employees changes everything

It's a fun, refreshing take. I've enjoyed building with it and feel like it is a glimpse into the not so distant future of how we will work.

Can it post to Reddit, X, etc.? How much does it cost in credits to do this?

It'd be fun to automate some social media bots, maybe develop an elaborate ARG on top.

Current use cases: - From a text it can download transcripts of youtube videos - summarise them and add them to an apple note. - It can get the top x videos on a subject - edit the videos and splice them together and share in the chat. - it can search for topics on socials and write a summary. - It can kick off a claude code idea and run tests

Am I the only one here to read posts by humans pretending to be bots?

I used ChatGPT for the first time last week. I'm a little behind the curve, I guess.

I have it installed in a VM, and overall it's fairly useful, but very buggy. Right now I can send it a message asking it something, and it won't answer. I typically have to follow up 2 or 3 times before I get an actual response. This weirdly used to work fine.

I'm running it on an old MacBook that I wiped a few months ago and had lying around. I tried installing it on an old raspberry pi first, but it was super slow and the skills ecosystem wants to use brew which doesn't work so well on the pi.

First impressions are that it's actually pretty interesting from an interface perspective. I could see a bigger provider using this to great success. Obviously it's not as revolutionary as people are hyping it up to be, but it's a step in the right direction. It reimagines where an agent interface should be in relation to the user and their device. For some reason it's easier to think of an agent as a dedicated machine, and it feels more capable when it's your own.

I think this project nails a new type of UX for LLM agents. It feels very similar to the paradigm shift felt after using Claude Code --dangerously-skip-permissions on a codebase, except this is for your whole machine. It also feels much less ephemeral than normal LLM sessions. But it still fills up its context pretty quickly, so you see diminishing returns.

I was a skeptic until I actually installed it and messed around with it. So far I'm not doing anything that I couldn't already do with Claude Code, but it is kind of cool to be able to text with an agent that lives on your hardware and has a basic memory of what you're using it for, who you are, etc. It feels more like a personal assistant than Claude Code which feels more like a disposable consultant.

I don't know if it really lives up to the hype, but it does make you think a little differently about how these tools should be presented and what their broader capabilities might be. I like the local files first mentality. It makes me excited for a time when running local models becomes easier.

I should add that it's very buggy. It worked great last night, now none of my prompts go through.

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