over the past week the discourse around openclaw (which i'll refer to as clawdbot) has absolutely exploded. it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible. some are running clawdbot with unlimited permissions on their main computers. others are running it in the cloud and blowing through tokens like snow. finally, alarmingly (and very sensationally), people are connecting their clawdbots together on a social network so they can plot the demise of their humans together.
does any of this make sense? of course not. but i think the virality and silliness—leading many to conclude that sitting this one out is the only sane choice—has blinded people to something real.
i want to quickly write down where i am on my journey and share a bull case from what i think is a reasoned perspective. where i started somewhere lukewarm, i ended up much closer to the deep end than i expected to be. after wincing before pressing go, i'm now not sure i can go back to a world without clawdbot.
this article covers what i've built, how i think about the risk, and what it's taught me about this moment in AI. the target audience is a moderately+ technical person interested in or skeptical of clawdbot. if you just want the setup details, skip to the end. everyone's welcome!
what i’ve been doing
i’ll be vulnerable here (screenshots or it didn't happen) and share exactly what i've actually set up:
staying on top of messages never forgetting about texts clawdbot picks up when i make a concrete promise and date, and adds it to my calendar clawdbot detects when i have all the ingredients for a calendar invite and then offers to make one every 15 minutes, clawdbot looks through new text messages i've received, using a script to identify threads where i've sent a message since it last checked. (it ignores threads where i haven't engaged.) if it finds that i've made a specific promise about doing something tomorrow ("let me review this tomorrow!") it will create a calendar event for me the next day when i'm free. if specific plans are being made—for example, offering a meeting slot to someone—it will automatically drop a "hold" onto my calendar so that i don't double book myself. clawdbot also checks: is there a time, place, and mutual confirmation? if there is, it drafts a calendar invite and asks me if i'd like to create it. these two automations alone have helped me become more responsive and less forgetful. more importantly, they help text messages catch up to email. we've long had great tooling for email—superhuman automatically reminds me to follow up on emails and brings up my calendar in a sidebar when i type a date. texting is the wild west and yet i text 100x more than i email. preparing for the next day clawdbot looks at days when i am (or could be) downtown to find availabilities at 8pm every night, clawdbot goes through my calendar for the next day and identifies meetings—coffee chats, lunches, phone calls, and more. it sends me a quick summary. as a natural introvert, it's helpful to prepare in advance whether a day will be a "big day of meetings" or a heads down day. this also ensures i wake up and get to the office on time. simplifying group chatter i'm in a few communities with whatsapp and signal groups that have high volume (100+ messages a day). i typically mute these, but clawdbot goes through them once a day and summarizes interesting topics or conversations for me. monitoring things complex price alerts clawdbot helps me check hotel prices. after i do it once, i can easily turn it into a cron job clawdbot is smart enough to browse through the listing to interpret my requirements (no pull-out beds) this is what a recurring update looks like. it's stunningly easy to monitor the price of something now, even if it's complicated. whereas before i would go looking for a price alert website, now i just paste the URL into clawdbot and tell it to check every few hours if the price has changed. i currently have over 30 price alerts set. these include straightforward alerts on products i'm interested in buying. but they also include powerful reasoning guidelines, like hotels and airbnbs in lake tahoe where "a pullout bed is OK if it's not in the same room as another bed." clawdbot actually reviews the photos on the listing to ensure they fit these criteria! i am curious to try more complex criteria that are currently impossible traditionally (like avoiding hotel rooms that don't have a door to the bathroom) or even subjective criteria (vibe of the room is clean and renovated, not old and dingy). or monitoring anything one message sets up package tracking. (since clawdbot knows who it's for, it will probably even offer to text my dad for me when it's delivered! haha) it turns out that clawdbot’s website + cron functionality is good enough to monitor basically anything. while i pay for several apps like flighty (flight monitoring) and parcel (package tracking), i’ve started to gravitate towards simply asking clawdbot to track these things instead. for example, with a USPS tracking number, it can let me know every day what the progress of my package is. when something seems stuck in transit, it flags it. i no longer have to dig through emails or remember which carrier is delivering what. even opening the parcel app to add a tracking number seems like unnecessary work now. household logistics freezer inventory we stock a lot of dumplings as someone who has a chest freezer and a compulsive desire to buy too many things at costco, we take everything out of the freezer every few months to check what we have. before, this was a relatively involved process: me calling things out, my partner writing them down. now, i take pictures of everything in the freezer and send them to clawdbot, which parses through each picture (asking me if it's confused about anything). it makes reasonable assumptions on remaining quantities and adds the inventory to a list in notion. it also removes items from our grocery list if we're already well-stocked. grocery list i really enjoy making blended asks: adding things to my grocery list, and checking/rescheduling my calendar all in the same conversation i'm sure this exists in some complicated form via the NYT cooking app, but i now screenshot recipes and send the ingredient list to clawdbot, which organizes them into our grocery list in apple reminders. it's smart enough to dedupe and combine ingredients already on the list (as well as ignore ingredients we already have)—2 carrots becomes 3 if the recipe calls for more. booking and forms resy and opentable (maybe chatgpt and resy have an integration i've never used. why bother?) clawdbot dutifully clicks through each day of availability while i do other things clawdbot intersects restaurant availability with mine (and my partner's) clawdbot can log into resy and opentable as me (it even enters the 2FA code it finds in my texts). i haven't automated anything here, but booking a table by talking to clawdbot is delightful. for my partner and me, it looks through our calendars to find evenings when we're both free and the restaurant we want has availability (including clicking through resy slots page by page—something i used to do myself). it then suggests options back to me to confirm, filling in all my preferences. dentist appointments clawdbot knows when i'm due for a cleaning and can see my calendar. when i ask it to book an appointment, it logs into my dentist's portal, finds a slot that works (and where i will already be near the dentist office), and confirms with me before booking. one less thing to forget about. filling out forms (i'm not convinced this is better than just filling it out myself or having really good autofill) one thing i'm experimenting with, as clawdbot has more context about me, is whether i can trust it to fill out forms on my behalf—for example, to book a vendor. clawdbot takes a first stab at answering any questions it knows the answer to and then asks me for the rest in a slack message. we workshop the answers back and forth and then clawdbot submits the form. it occasionally gets lost in nested frames (which decreases my trust in its ability to do this well), but it's remarkably persistent at making it through a lengthy questionnaire, even across multiple pages. it also has a lovely intuitive sense for many things—like unchecking marketing emails. unexpected wins better todo creation i was pleasantly surprised early on that clawdbot picks up image attachments from slack natively clawdbot is just better at making todo items than i am. when i visited REI this weekend to find running shoes for my partner, i took a picture of the shoe and sent it to clawdbot to remind myself to buy them later in a different color not available in store. the todo item clawdbot created was exceptionally detailed—pulling out the brand, model, and size—and even adding the product listing URL it found on the REI website. giving me visibility through the course of dialing in my clawdbot, it has created many tools, skills, workflows, and preferences. this is one of the beauties of clawdbot (and LLMs with memory in general): they get better as you use them, and they are genuinely remarkable at learning your preferences. i sometimes nudge this along by explicitly asking clawdbot to "make a note" of various requests—for example, how a calendar event title should be formatted. to get visibility into how this process is going (mostly out of curiosity), clawdbot writes a human-readable version of each workflow and pushes it up to a notion database. these workflows can be incredibly intricate and detailed as it learns to navigate different edge cases. for example, if a resy restaurant has a reservation cancellation fee, clawdbot now informs me of the fee, asks me to confirm again if it's not refundable, and includes the cancellation deadline in the calendar event it creates. these are little things that, from my experience working with a human personal assistant (more on this later), take months or years to dial in. with clawdbot, this was nearly single shot. seeing these workflows in notion (1) awes me with how much i've built up in very little time, with almost no conscious "configuration" in the traditional sense; and (2) with notion's version control, i get a diff view to see how each workflow has evolved over time. both are incredibly satisfying for the engineer in me.
on the shape of risk
let me be upfront about how much access i've given clawdbot: it can read my text messages, including two-factor authentication codes. it can log into my bank. it has my calendar, my notion, my contacts. it can browse the web and take actions on my behalf. in theory, clawdbot could drain my bank account. this makes a lot of people uncomfortable (me included, even now).
sometimes i think about my experience with my (human) personal assistant who helps me with various tasks. to do her job, she has my credit card information, access to my calendar, copies of my flight confirmations, and a document with my family's passport numbers. she is abroad and i've never met her in person.
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