105 points by aavci 5 days ago | 87 comments on HN
| Neutral Community · v3.7· 2026-03-01 02:45:52 0
Summary Technical Creativity Neutral
The content is a community discussion question on Hacker News asking users to share productive achievements with OpenClaw software. The page shows minimal engagement with human rights themes, with structural signals primarily supporting information sharing, technical education, and creative expression. The evaluation reflects the platform's facilitation of technical community discussion rather than explicit human rights advocacy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
Now if you have multiple teams each doing this and then have all those agents talk to each other and then report back to your team, you get "AI Hyperchat"[0], which may actually be a really good idea that has the potential to seriously improve intra-organizational communications (disruptively so). See also [1] for a VentureBeat article about the idea.
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.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 10:41:39 UTC
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