Mastodon isn't "about the politics," though. It already existed when the diaspora from Twitter occurred, it wasn't created for that reason.
There's plenty of good "content" there - although calling it that feels too capitalist. People don't join Mastodon to create a product out of themselves to be consumed, as is the case on mainstream social media. That sort of influencer-based economy isn't feasible on Mastodon because it doesn't use algorithms which maximize controversy and addition over everything else. So it winds up feeling like an actual community of friends sharing common interests rather than a Skinner box optimized for endorphines.
I see a decent number of people on social media who won't stop posting about how great it is and how much of a moron every person is for not using it.
Oddly enough, rarely, if ever do they say what specific things they're using it for and how it's saving them time.
I remain interested in it, however, I've still awaiting an actual use case that can't be handled by some other tool/service that does it better/faster.
What it adds is making this kind of thing easy for normies, even if it's neither the best way to do things nor very difficult for hobbyists to do using existing tech.
Maybe it's the wrong approach, maybe what people really want is more deterministic software that they use agents to help write. But this kind of thing can maybe serve as a prototyping phase for that. Perhaps in the future, people's assistants will offer to "solidify" frequently used workflows into software that minimizes or eliminates the LLM's role. For existing Claude Code users, its like "please just skip to that step! its cheaper and more secure and more reliable". But to many people who are interested in automation, perhaps that seems out of reach as a first step.
That's actually the best hypothesis I've heard to date.
My immediate reaction to anything someone says they're using OpenClaw for is "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing, which would be better in every possible way."
My approach to automation projects is just about the polar opposite of something like OpenClaw. How can I take this messy real-world thing and turn it into structured data? How can I build an API for the thing that doesn't have one? How can I define rules and configuration in a way that I can understand more about how something is working instead of less? How can I build a dashboard or other interface so I can see exactly the information I want to see instead of having to read a bunch of text?
It wasn't really until people started building things with coding assistants that I even saw the value in LLMs, because I realized they could speed up the rate at which I can build tools for my team to get things OUT of chat and INTO structured data with clean interfaces and deterministic behavior.
> "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing
As a no-longer-Claw-user, hard disagree. The convenience is being able to ask it to do something while I'm grocery shopping and have it automatically test it etc. Sure, I can set up Claude Code or some other tool similarly, but the majority of us aren't going to take the time to set it up to do what OpenClaw does out of the box.
I had OpenClaw do a lot of stuff for me in the 2-3 weeks I used it than I have with pi/Claude since I stopped using it.
Lots of simple one offs. Stuff like "Here's the URL for a forum thread that has 10 pages of messages. Go through all of them and tell me if information X is in there." Or "Here is the site to after school activities. Check it once a day and notify me if there is anything that begins in March."
Also, got it to give me the weather information I always want - I've not found a weather app that does it and would always have to go to a site and click, click, click.
I can add TODOs to my todo list that's sitting on my home PC (I don't have todos on the cloud or phone).
All of these can be vibe coded, but each one would take more effort than just telling OpenClaw to do it.
So what I'm doing now is I have termux on my phone with a persistent tmux session that is SSHed into my desktop over tailscale. It stays open all the time with Claude Code running on it in a VM in yolo mode.
If I want to ask it to do something like research and add tasks to my schedule I just tap on termux on my phone, I'm already at the Claude prompt and I just type in or voice dictate in what I want. Claude via skills and MCPs can do literally anything on my computer or connected accounts.
I'm literally not sure what I would use something like openclaw for as every time someone describes it to me it's already something I can do in this system I set up in 20 minutes. Is there something I'm missing here?
Deterministic scheduled scripts for repeating tasks is where a lot of the value lives, that's basically what Atmita (atmita.com) is built around. You describe the job in plain English, pick when it runs, and it runs on a schedule. Cloud-hosted with managed OAuth to the apps you already use, API-first so you can wire anything else in directly. Not based on OpenClaw, built from scratch.
These are actually really great examples, because I've done several similar things with a more code-based deterministic approach, still utilizing an LLM.
I also have a number of sites that I query regularly with LLMs, but I use a combination of RSS and crawlers to pull the info into a RAG and query that, and have found the built-in agent loops in my LLM to be sufficient for one-offs.
I also hate most weather apps, so I have a weather section on my Home Assistant dashboard that pulls exactly what I want from the sources I want that my LLM helped me configure.
I also have my main todo list hosted on a computer at home, but since all of my machines including my phone are on the same virtual wireguard network, I use my editor of choice to read and write todos on any device I use as if it were a local file, and again, it's something my local LLM has access to for context.
I don't think either approach is wrong, but I much prefer being able to have something to debug if it doesn't behave the way I expect it to. And maybe part of the reason I'm skeptical of the hype is that a lot of the parts of this setup aren't novel to me: I had crawlers and RSS readers and a weather dashboard and private access to a well-organized filesystem across devices before LLMs were a thing - the only difference now is that I'm asking a machine to help me configure it instead of relying on a mix of documentation, example code, and obscure Reddit posts.
It gives me a pleasant interface to talk to my desktop from my phone. I can just send my computer a discord message and have it execute some arbitrarily complex task for me.
I talk to my desktop from my phone by having termux opened to a persistent tmux session that's sshed in to the desktop over tailscale. I have Claude running in the persistent session. It's 1 tap to open the termux app and I type my commands into a Claude session running in yolo mode. What am I missing here that would need one of these claw agents?
Fair question. The niche I keep running into is jobs that cross a few apps (Gmail, Calendar, GitHub, a DB) and need to run on a schedule. Any one tool handles a piece, but stitching them together end to end is the chore. Built atmita.com for that. Cloud hosted, managed OAuth, jobs described in plain English. Not based on OpenClaw, built from scratch.
We're using OpenClaw to do a massive number of fixes and improvements to our ERP.
It takes Jira tickets, resolves them, and creates a GitHub PR, which is then reviewed by another AI agent. It can even analyse screenshots with MS Paint-style arrows.
So far it's been an amazing tool - I am very impressed.
I think once I see someone post a use case that I could actually see saving me some serious time, I'll take the plunge. Until then, I'll just let people continue to say how great (or terrible) it is.
In fact, I recently started a one-man-show business I'm doing as a bit of an experiment in my city.
Every single web agency here builds WordPress sites. Really old, mostly ugly, WordPress sites.
So I've built out a next.js-powered CRM that's faster, more secure, easier to use, etc.
Now I'm in the starting stages of rebuilding local sites for free just to grab the case studies.
I'm doing this 1.) as a bit of an experiment and 2.) because it feels like the web agencies here are ripe for disruption (and no one else seems to even mention or touch AI)
With Claude + Codex (and a 15-year background in WordPress) I've jumped from taking around a month to build out a custom site to less than a day.
The interesting/tougher part will be product/market fit and building those first few paying clients.
So to answer your question? It definitely looks like it. I'm sure there are plenty out there who are adapting but they seem to be the exception in what I've seen.
Giant leaps in innovation almost always have a reaction like this.
It's new, people fear it. Sometimes justified, usually not.
People greatly feared the car because of the number of horse-related jobs it would displace.
President Benjamin Harrison and First Lady Caroline Harrison feared electricity so much they refused to operate light switches to avoid being shocked. They had staff turn lights on/off for them.
Looking back at these we might laugh.
We're largely in the same boat now.
It's possible AI will destroy us all, but judging from history, the irrational reactions to something new isn't exactly unprecedented.
Many innovations are also on the refuse pile of history. Indoor gas lighting[1] is one. People were quite justifiably skeptical of electricity, when its relatively short-lived predecessor frequently killed people in explosions, carbon monoxide poisoning, etc.
> when its relatively short-lived predecessor frequently killed people
If only it were this obvious when the polluted air isn't your home but the entire planet, killing not your grandma but taking a few healthy years of life from everyone simultaneously. Maybe people would feel like we need to reverse priorities rather than go full steam ahead on newly created energy demand and see about cleaning it up later
Every invention is touted as the next electricity, or the next internet (crypto scams anyone?)
Meanwhile not every invention is. Electricity and internet are electricity and internet, and very few inventions come even close to that. Meanwhile LLMs have had arguably a net negative effect on the world at large.
Is it irrational to wonder how large swathes of the population will earn a living if their employable skills vanish in a couple of years, with little prospect for retraining into something else that AI hasn't replaced? Is it irrational to wonder what effect an influx of the AI-replaced will have on remaining AI-free fields? Is it irrational to wonder about the psychological impact of work where one simply operates the AI instead of thinking, creating, growing? Is it irrational to wonder if wealth inequality will spiral when these essentially-unobtainable resources are used by a select few to enact the above scenarios?
I can only assume you have easy answers for all of these questions given your casual dismissal of such concerns, likening them to being scared of a light switch.
I've long since stopped building WordPress sites for clients, but you would be blown away by the number of people who have installed the free version of Securi or Wordfence, zero configuration, and then assume their site is completely safe from attacks.
You absolutely can't rely on the free version of WordFence. It should also be the last line of defense to handle anything that can't get caught by the server WAF.
I recently cleaned a WordPress site (that I now get to manage) of some malware that had multiple redundant persistence layers and the attacker had whitelisted the folders in the WordFence scan. Was actually kind of handy as a checklist to see if I'd missed anything.
What WordFence did manage to do was email an alert that there had been an unauthorised admin login as their admin password had been compromised.
We are, after all, talking about some metadata here you are more than welcome to leave off your site.
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