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Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included

79 points by robthompson2018

by Tharre

2 subcomments

I don't get it. The point of OpenClaw is it's supposed to be an assistant, helping you with whatever random tasks you happen to have, in natural language. But for that to work, it has to have access to your personal data, your calendar, your emails, your credit card, etc., no?
Are there other tasks that people commonly want to run, that don't require this, that I'm not aware of? If so I'd love to hear about them.
The ClawBert thing makes a lot more sense to me, but implementing this with just a Claude Code instance again seems like a really easy way to get pwned. Without a human in the loop and heavy sandboxing, a agent can just get prompt injected by some user-controlled log or database entry and leak your entire database and whatever else it has access to.

by ndnichols

4 subcomments

This sounds awesome and exactly like the easy and safe on-ramp to OpenClaw that I've been looking for! I want to believe.
Two questions as a potential user who knows the gist of OpenClaw but has been afraid to try it: 1. I don't understand how the two consumption credits play into the total cost of ownership. E.g. how long will $20 of Orthogonal credits last me? I have no idea what it will actually cost to use Klaus/OpenClaw for a month. 2. Batteries included sounds great, but what are those batteries? I've never heard of Apollo or Hunter.io so I don't know the value of them being included.
In general, a lot of your copy sounds like it's written for people already deep into OpenClaw. Since you're not targeting those folks, I would steer more towards e.g. articulating use cases that work ootb and a TCO estimate for less technical folks. Good luck, and I'm eager to try it!

by jimmySixDOF

0 subcomment

Nice turn key solution I like that it comes with it's own email and you don't need to add anything .... I was a fan of this VPS setup service for a beads agent system up from end to end but you need to BYO everything still it's free as in open source so got to thank Sir Dicklesworthstone for putting it together --
https://agent-flywheel.com/

by nullcathedral

2 subcomments

Do you run a dedicated "AI SRE" instance for each customer or how do you ensure there is no potential for cross-contamination or data leakage across customers?
Basically how do you make sure your "AI SRE" does not deviate from it's task and cause mayhem in the VM, or worse. Exfiltrates secrets, or other nasty things? :)

by ar_lan

0 subcomment

I tried this service a few weeks ago, and I commend the goal - but there were a few issues I ran into:
1. There are many interactions I just could not get to work. I may have done something wrong, but in general, I have the perspective that most products should "just work" if it's as simple as clicking a button or directing something. In this case, I'm tangibly talking about the Browser feature, and the Canvas feature. In my account, I tried many times to have OpenClaw use the Browser to access a website and send me a screenshot, and it regularly reported the Browser was inaccessible, even though I had enabled it via Klaus UI. Secondly, I asked it to write certain reports to the Canvas as HTML pages that I could review - the entries would show up as files I could click on, but the files themselves were always empty. 2. OpenClaw with tokens is insanely expensive - I blew through the $15 tokens in a matter of a day.
For the first, my guess is I misconfigured something, but it's really difficult to identify what is wrong. My expectation was that I could prompt via Telegram to configure anything and everything, but some link was missing. Although I am a technical person, my expectation was that I would not need to muck around via `ssh` to figure out where my files ended up.
For the latter - and more broadly - OpenClaw is not well understood for most, and I think they will be caught off guard just how expensive it is. $15 in tokens is not a lot with how inefficient OpenClaw can be. My suggestion would be:
1. Pre-configure OpenClaw with already extremely memory-efficient rules and skills. 2. Provide clear guidance/documentation on ideal agent setup with different models as necessary. I think OpenRouter attempts to achieve this pretty well, but you are providing a layer on top of OpenRouter that may not be obvious to less-well-versed people. 3. Batteries-included options should "just work" - I felt I wasted a lot of tokens just figuring out how to get the thing to do simple tasks for me.
---
A lot of the notes I made are less about your product and what you've achieved, and more to do with OpenClaw. However, you've achieved one major milestone - which is the one-click setup of OpenClaw. But if your target demographic is the less technically inclined folks that want to be able to play with the bleeding edge of AI practices, I think your platform needs to guide users to how to actually use this thing, and become useful right away.
It may even be beneficial to showcase extremely clear workflows for users to get started and sell why they even want OpenClaw.
---
Anyway, kudos on the release! It is not easy to ship and you've done that hard bit! I bid you good luck on the next phase!

by sealthedeal

3 subcomments

Is this not just Claude Code? Genuinely hoping someone could spell it out for me

by scosman

2 subcomments

What's the best "docker with openclaw" currently available? I have my own computers to run it on (I don't need a server). I want to play around, but containerized to avoid the security risk of MacOS app.
There seem to be about 20 options, and new ones every day. Any consensus on the best few are, and their tradeoffs?

by tristanwaddell

0 subcomment

That's a cool idea, i'll be sure to check it out

by orsorna

1 subcomments

Does the claw in the VM have proven capability (verified by your team) to track changes it makes to itself and persist across reboots? What about rollback capability?

by hasa

1 subcomments

I get impression that this is automation tool for sales people. Does it do robotic phone calls to try to book meetings with customers?

by rid

1 subcomments

What does the VM consist of? Is the image available?

by _joel

0 subcomment

"The week after our launch we spent 20+ hours fixing broken machines by hand."
oh fuck yea, sounds great.
Hard pass on this (and OpenClaw) thanks.

by nonameiguess

0 subcomment

Acknowledging the reality of history and business here that there's a 99% chance you don't exist in a few years, I would encourage you nonetheless to break EC2 and AWS in every single way you can possibly imagine and in ways you can't, obviously not in your customer account, but in a separate one. I was doing consulting services for a machine learning company that sold pre-configured EC2s and associated data infra to third-party researchers at a markup and basically stood up and ran their whole environment for about two years. Networking is probably the most frustrating thing you'll ever encounter and beware when they change their APIs and parameters that used to default to null no longer do. It's especially fun when the Linux kernel on the hypervisors you can't see messes with your packets.

by Myzel394

1 subcomments

Sounds like a perfect data leak any% speedrun to me... :P

by octoclaw

0 subcomment

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by baileywickham

0 subcomment

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by Mooshux

1 subcomments

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by ilovesamaltman

1 subcomments

this is reallly fucking interesting
mind if I write an article about this on ijustvibecodedthis.com ?

by webpolis

0 subcomment

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