As a real world example, I was told to evaluate Claude Code and ChatGPT codex at my current job since my boss had heard about them and wanted to know what it would mean for our operations. Our main environment is a C# and Typescript monorepo with 2 products being developed, and even with a pretty extensive test suite and a nearly 100 line "AGENTS.md" file, all models I tried basically fail or try to shortcut nearly every task I give it, even when using "plan mode" to give it time to come up with a plan before starting. To be fair, I was able to get it to work pretty well after giving it extremely detailed instructions and monitoring the "thinking" output and stopping it when I see something wrong there to correct it, but at that point I felt silly for spending all that effort just driving the bot instead of doing it myself.

It almost feels like this is some "open secret" which we're all pretending isn't the case too, since if it were really as good as a lot of people are saying there should be a massive increase in the number of high quality projects/products being developed. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I really do feel like I'm going crazy here.

> This has truly freed up my productivity, letting me pursue so many ideas I couldn’t move forward on before

If you're writing in a blog post that AI has changed your life and let you build so many amazing projects, you should link to the projects. Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.

Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it.

Science and the academic world

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue.

Is it to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it.

Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.

What type of code? What types of tools? What sort of configuration? What messaging app? What projects?

It answers none of these questions.

The only software I've seen designed and implemented by OpenClaw is moltbook. And I think it is hard to come up with a bigger pile of crap than Moltbook.

If somebody can build something decent with OpenClaw, that would help add some credibility to the OpenClaw story.

For me the pain point has always been with non-IT people/companies. They are way more accustomed with phone or even in person appointments. They in general have way more of a say than me, the customer.

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. It can make notes for me (useless as most notes are useless). It can scrap websites for me (not very interesting as why would I want to collect so much knowledge?). It can probably automate anything that already has an endpoint or whatever, but I don’t mind write code for my own projects. I always failed to understand why anyone would want to let AI write most of the code of their PERSONAL project — unless they want to sell them quickly.

I’m just a frustrated old man I guess.

[1] https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...

I tried using LLMs to help debug at different points, but they went in circles on bad ideas, even when I gave them what turned out to be a correct clue.

Root cause turned out to be that IPv6 wasn't enabled for Docker networking, but was enabled for the websites DNS. So people who connected over IPv6 were getting their IPs all converted to the same internal Docker IP before being handed to the per-IP throttling algorithm.

I spotted that there were no IPv6 IPs in the logs, but the LLMs missed that the key pattern was the absence of something expected, instead drawing wrong conclusions.

So no, I'm not about to turn OpenClaw loose on building anything at all complex.

> OpenClaw gave me the chance to become that super manager [...] A manager shouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics—they should focus on the higher-level, abstract work

These two propositions seem to be highly incompatible

Honestly I'd rather die

I don't know about this; or at least, in my experience, is not a what happens with good managers.

> Generally, I believe [Rabbit] R1 has the potential to change the world. This is a thought that seldom comes to my mind, as I have seen numerous new technologies and inventions. However, R1 is different; it’s not just another device to please a certain niche. It’s meticulously designed to serve one significant goal for all people: to improve lifestyle in the digital world.

That would be really helpful.

And me ruining my day fighting with a million hooks, specs and custom linters micromanaging Claude Code in the pursuit of beautiful code.

I feel like there's this "secret" hiding behind all these AI tools, that actually it's all very complicated and takes a lot of effort to make work, but the tools we're given hides it all. It's nice that we benefit from its simplicity of use. But hiding complexity leads to unexpected problems, and I'm not sure we've seen any of those yet - other than the massive, gaping security hole.

I'm not running OpenClaw, but I've given Claude its own email address and built a polling loop to check email & wake Claude up when I've sent it something. I'm finding a huge improvement from that. Working via email seems to change the Claude dynamic, it feels more like collaborating with a co-worker or freelancer. I can email Claude when I'm out of the house and away from my computer, and it has locked down access to use various tools so it can build some things in reply to my emails.

I've been looking into building out voice memos or an Eleven Labs setup as well, so I can talk to Claude while I'm out exercising, washing dishes etc. Voice memos will be relatively easy but I haven't yet got my head around how to integrate Eleven Labs and work with my local data & tools (I don't want a Claude that's running on Eleven Labs servers).

So, OpenClaw has changed his life: It has accelerated the AI psychosis.

Regardless of how you isolate the OpenClaw instance (Mac Mini, VPS, whatever) - if it’s allowed to browse the web for answers then there’s the very real risk of prompt injection inserting malicious code into the project.

If you are personally reviewing every line of code that it generates you can mitigate that, but I’d wager none of these “super manager” users are doing that.

https://github.com/PSPDFKit-labs/nutrient-openclaw -

The skill is here as well if you prefer a skill - https://clawhub.ai/jdrhyne/nutrient-openclaw

> Rabbit R1 - The Upgraded Replacement for Smart Phones

Kinda hard to take anything here seriously.

- Because the seasoned developers have something entirely different to say https://www.xda-developers.com/please-stop-using-openclaw/

- Also please stop spamming HN with this stuff

And 99% those AI-created "amazing projects" are going to be dead or meaningless in due time, rather sooner than later. Wasted energy and water, not to mention the author's lifetime.

I let it run in a VM on my desktop and I can check on its progress and provide feedback any time. Only took a few iterations of telling it to tweak its workflow to land on something very productive. Doesn't work for everything but it covers a lot of my work.

This has been a significant aspect of ai use as well. As a result a feel a little less friction with myself, less that I am letting things slip by because, well, because I still want a nice balance to work, life, leisure, etc. I don’t want to overstate things, it’s not a cure all for any of these things, but it helps a lot.

Don't compare your day 1 with some one's day 100

Some are learning the hard way why you shouldn't do that having to hire freelancer developers the fix their entire code.

I spoke with a friend who is also in IT, the company he works for is full on into AI, everything is done or managed by AI, they only hit the button. Dude was describing their infrastructure and projects like if AI was a God.

Those are gonna be the first ones to fall, because they aren't using AI to improve their work, they are using AI to completely take over, full access to projects, full access to infrastructures, you name it.

> Generally, I believe (Rabbit) R1 has the potential to change the world.

There is a pattern here.

So, it appears that we have come a long way bubbling up through abstraction layers: assembly code -> high-level languages -> scripting -> prompting -> openclaw.

If you delegate these tasks to OpenClaw, I am not really sure the result is exactly what you want to achieve and it works like you want it to.

Once we get to a spot where the AI can check its work and iterate, the loop is closed. But we are a long way off from that atm. Even for the web. I mean, have you tried the Playwright MCP server? Aside from being the slowest tool calls I have ever seen, the agent struggles mightily to figure out the simplest of navigation and interaction.

Yes yes Unit tests, but functional is the be all end all and until it can iterate and create its own functional test suite, I just don’t get it.

What am I missing?

> Then OpenClaw came along, and everything changed.

> After a few rounds of practice, I found that I could completely step away from the programming environment and handle an entire project’s development, testing, deployment, launch, and usage—all through chatting on my phone.

So, with Claude Code, you're stuck typing in a chat box. Now, with OpenClaw, you can type in a chat box on your phone? This is exciting and revolutionary.

The free versions are toys

I haven't been able to find a good use for myself yet. Almost everything I use an LLM for has some kind of hard human-in-the-loop factor that is as of yet inescapable -- but I also don't really use LLMs for things like "sort my email.". mostly entirely coding.

Click bait at its peak.

It's the endgame.

Even then, the architecture will be horrible unless you chat _a lot_ about it upfront. At some point, it’s easier to just look in the terminal.

Maybe it's unfair to judge an author's current opinion by their past opinion - but since the piece is ultimately an opinion based on their own experience I'm going to take it along a giant pile of salt that the author's standards for the output of AI tools are vastly different than mine.

Poe's law strikes... I can't tell if this is satire.

https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...

I hope at some point there will be a medical research into this hysteria.

getting sick of this fluff stuff

Agents work but still mostly produce slop.

There's not a single real example, and it even has all the em-dashes intact.

Press [Space] to skip

I quite like it just from the simple perspective that its a local LLM provider that's available to chat with in tons of apps I already use (e.g. Discord); its a good reduction in the number of parties who are privy to these conversations. I'm not sure if there's another system out there that's so plug-and-play, with so many options for conversation (Discord, Telegram, text, self-hosted web ui, etc).

But the tool calling is vastly overblown. It takes forever to get them set up, and that's to get them barely working. Bluebubbles has always been an ish app whose reverse engineering of the iMessage protocol is more likely to break on every macOS upgrade than do what you want it to do; and OpenClaw's iMessage integration is built on it. I've not yet gotten a Spotify skill to work (though I'm not sure what I'd do with it when I have one); the models just run in circles saying "it should be set up, ope its not, spotify_player sucks, lets try spt, wait that isn't working, lets try ncspot, why isn't this working". The "gog" tool is interesting, its a CLI-based tool for accessing data in your google account, it works alright, though OpenClaw's icon for the tool in their repository is a game controller icon; I suspect a mistaken, likely vibed, reference to the unrelated GOG/Good Ol' Games PC game store. What a mess. I could go on.

The cheaper models critically struggle to grep the full array of tools they have available to them. Kimi K2.5 exhibits this behavior where it will reiterate that it does not have access to my calendar, but usually if I ask it four or five times in a row, eventually it will claim it "discovered" the gog/Google Calendar tool in a hidden sub-directory (what?). Even with more intelligent models, like Opus or 5.2/5.3, the tools oftentimes need to be invoked with highly specific verbiage; "what's on my calendar" might work if you're lucky, but "use gog to fetch my calendar and display today's events" usually works.

I oftentimes just don't see the point. I can click the Gmail or Google Calendar app on my phone and get what I need out of those apps in less-than 6 seconds; it would take longer for me to dictate the exact phrasing to get what I need out of OpenClaw, let alone type it. I can see some argument for cross-operating on data between two apps, but getting that to work without paying Anthropic fifty cents for every query is even rarer. When I need an LLM to operate on my Obsidian notes, I can just use Claude Code or OpenCode... why do I need OpenClaw?

(I am genuinely open minded here; but articles like this just dance around high-minded abstract ideas of "im a super ai manager im so productive" without giving concrete examples. My suspicion is that the people who write these things were previously deeply unproductive people, and now AI has enabled them to achieve a mere fraction of the productivity that most of us already had.)

(And that's being generous. I think there's also a lot of grifters out there. I'll have to fire a stray at Cloudflare for this one: They've published a "get OpenClaw working on Cloudflare" repo where, if you set it up, would straight up cost you $50-$60, maybe $100/month; and they lie [1] about the cost in their own documentation. And you're paying that in addition to the LLM cost. Very bad look from a company I admire.)

[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/moltworker/issues/76#issuecomm...

For the impatient, here's a transcript summary (from Gemini):

  The speaker describes creating a "virtual employee" (dubbed a "replicant") running on a local server with unrestricted, authenticated access to a real productivity stack—including Gmail, Notion, Slack, and WhatsApp. Tasked with podcast production, the agent autonomously researched guests, "vibe coded" its own custom CRM to manage data, sent email invitations, and maintained a work log on a shared calendar. The experiment highlights the agent's ability to build its own internal tools to solve problems and interact with humans via email and LinkedIn without being detected as AI.