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All: quite a few comments in this thread (and another one we merged hither - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099160) have contained personal attacks. Hopefully most of them are [flagged] and/or [dead] now.
On HN, please don't cross into personal attack no matter how strongly you feel about someone or disagree with them. It's destructive of what the site is for, and we moderate and/or ban accounts that do it.
If you haven't recently, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure that you're using the site as intended when posting here.
I’m confused can someone please explain to me why he or she is so controversial?
The personal attacks I saw were against different people, not just one. In a lot of cases it's just routine internet cynicism, which is always amplified against unusually successful or prominent people.
There's also a lot of fear and anger about the AI tsunami these days, among certain user cohorts, and that's an amplifier as well.
On HN, personal attacks aren't allowed regardless of who's being attacked, and comments are asked to make their substantive points thoughtfully and not be cynical or snarky. Here's one guideline:
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
Okay I see. Are people being attacked for engaging in AI research/dev irrespective of their character or other personal attributes?
By dang 2026-02-2221:35 The data supports that interpretation, among others.
By irthomasthomas 2026-02-229:112 reply I saw simonw getting attacked for sharing his bloglink about it, only it was not even simonw who shared the link here.
By BoredPositron 2026-02-229:452 reply I can understand the sentiment against Simon it's just to much of the same content over and over again but I handled it with just blacklisting him no need for personal attacks.
By whilenot-dev 2026-02-2210:14 How can I blacklist/hide an HN account?
By dingnuts 2026-02-2219:41 [dead]
By paganel 2026-02-229:25 Saw that, too, but at some point one cannot just stand like sheep in the slaughterhouse, the reaction was to be expected (even though it could have happened in a more civilized way, not via personal-ish attacks, I agree with that).
More generally, there are now literally trillions of dollars being invested in this madness/tsunami/whatever-one-wants-to-call-it, which means that it has now become impossible to follow said money so as to follow the conflicts of interests (it’s easy to assume a conflict of interest for a guy like Karpathy given his past and recent employment history, but I do think that Simon is more on the genuine side), so this is why that counter-reaction is now manifesting itself so chaotically, hitting left and right with not necessarily any logic behind it, which means that there are going to be collateral “casualties” during it all (such as Simon in this case).
By th0ma5 2026-02-226:21 [dead]
By simondotau 2026-02-2122:491 reply Being rude isn't helpful. It's not their fault, it's the unavoidable reality of treating complex social signalling as one-dimensional. At minimum Hacker News would need to separate approval/disapproval signals from assessments of whether a comment is constructive. That’s not a simple change given the obvious abuse vectors. It would require reliably distinguishing good-faith participants from bad actors. It can be done, but it's not easy.
The main reason sites avoid this approach is institutional rather than technical. Adding algorithmic mediation invites accusations of algorithmic bias whenever results are unpopular.[0] Simple manual interventions are often sufficient to nudge community behaviour so that majority outcomes broadly align with the moderators’ priors, without the visibility or accountability costs of a more complex system.
[0] Case in point being X. People routinely accuse the new management of "juicing" the algorithm to favour their politics, when outcomes are adequately explained by the exodus of contributors on the other side. Isolating innate community bias from algorithms is a philosophically impossible problem.
By michaelmrose 2026-02-2216:221 reply I really like the idea of multiple vectors although nobody seems apt to pick up the idea other than Slashdot.
The reason I left there was the down vote brigade that really killed most genuine criticism that disagrees with the sites pre formed opinions on certain topics. So I'm not sure it's a solved problem. Unless it's gotten better since 2011?
By michaelmrose 2026-02-280:25 I think the specific community and some of the ways it does moderation and voting are seperable and I would love to see the latter tested on an open source discussion platform
By edoceo 2026-02-2123:31 When I review the link posted by @dang it says talking about downvotes is boring. Maybe that's why your comment is grey. (This comment should turn grey as well)
By derangedHorse 2026-02-2123:151 reply It's not 'downvote abuse' if it's working exactly as intended. The community decides what's 'perfectly fine and neutral.' If your comments follow the guidelines, at least they won't get deleted.
This is pretty obviously false? I get downvoted quite frequently on HN for posting comments that go against what people typically think. For instance, I find it quite difficult to discuss the productivity gains of AI because any comment I make saying that AI makes me more productive immediately gets downvotes. I am not making inflammatory comments - my comments with a similar tone about other things that boost my productivity, like Rust or whatever, never get downvoted.
By mikkupikku 2026-02-2212:132 reply It's genuinely pathetic to care about downvotes. People downvote me all the time and you don't hear me crying about it. People disagreeing with you is simply the price you pay when you decide to have hot takes, and don't say you didn't understand this up front.
By johnfn 2026-02-2222:32 I'm here to have interesting conversations. Downvotes naturally inhibit that by pushing my comment out of sight. There is nothing "pathetic" about that.
You'd have to be f'n dumb to think anybody cares about votes, if it was just votes. No it fucking hides the comment and prevents you from replying for a while.
And it's so one sided: If just the first 3-5 people who see your comment downvote it, it can prevent hundreds or thousands from seeing it. Way too easy to bury the truth and sometimes used that way.
And look: I downvoted you but you can't downvote me, because I replied to your comment. How dumb did they want this system to be?
Also, timing matters: Sometimes if I post a ""hOt TaKe"" and it gets downvoted immediately, if I delete it and repost the same shit, right away or at a later time, sometimes it gets upvoted on the 2nd or 3rd time try: Proving that only the first few votes really matter. Even a 2020 AI could game this crap.
Working as intended my ass
And I'm not just talking about my own comments and didn't have a part in this post's conversation, I see this shit happening to others all the time and point it out to dang whenever he talks like HN is some posh upscale establishment above the shenanigans of the rest of the net.
By mikkupikku 2026-02-2212:40 Going gray gets more eyeballs on your comment than if you were to stay at 1, people will actually stop and read whatever it was that's so controversial. You really are caring far too much.
How does that make it “obviously false”? The community doesn’t want to hear about how AI isn’t working for people on every AI article. That’s the current balance of votes in the community.
By aleph_minus_one 2026-02-2216:221 reply > The community doesn’t want to hear about how AI isn’t working for people on every AI article.
The community doesn't want to hear about how AI is the panacea for the problems some people have on every AI article, either.
By kortilla 2026-02-2220:08 Don’t read AI articles. The vote balances are a reflection of the current majority opinions. That’s how these voting based social site work, by design.
By SilverElfin 2026-02-220:323 reply [flagged]
> Weirdly, he doesn’t care about the toxicity problems on Twitter/X either,
> Yet he has the nerve to call HN toxic.
That's not weird or paradoxical. They don't have to delineate every online platform they disagree with in order to criticize HN; "orange site bad" is a pretty common sentiment in my experience.
By giancarlostoro 2026-02-221:271 reply I hear about X being hateful but nobody wants to talk about how toxic BlueSky actually is. I had to stop going on there permanently. I dont think I have ever quit a social media platform as quickly and permanently as BlueSky.
This is also a strawman. Both platforms are irrelevant to this discussion.
By giancarlostoro 2026-02-2219:53 Not to what I was responding to.
By art-12937 2026-02-220:51 The chutzpah of complaining about the level here when most tech threads on X are primitive billionaire marketing. Why don't they complain about Musk's X?
It isn't enough that Karpathy is rich---we also need to admire him. That dynamic was satirized in the Silicon Valley show with Gavin Belson.
Also relevant:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-dont-say-mean-thi...
By fullstackchris 2026-02-2121:271 reply [flagged]
Managers will be starting to ask for claws in the development flow, claws for automation, etc. Another flashy trend everyone will have to endure because an influencer is hyping the tech. It happened in 2024/2025. Every manager demanding use of "vibe coding", because they bought the lie that is what everyone is doing and is the best thing since sliced bread and whatnot. Karpathy comes up with a new shit to hype, and everyone will jump on the bandwagon. It's exhausting. It's like when there was a new frontend framework every single month and everyone just following the trend. Backbone is good enough. Then Vue. Then react. Then angular. Then svelte. Then SolidJs. Then Astro. Probably now everyone and their mothers will try to come with another abstraction layer on top of llms, then on top of agents, then on top of claws. Like I said, it's exhausting and the ROI of jumping every single fucking trend is becoming really hard to see.
By fullstackchris 2026-02-2216:48 You put this in much better words than I obviously could!
By mikkupikku 2026-02-2212:174 reply Stop taking work so seriously. You're getting paid to deal with other people's nonsense, and if you're in tech you're getting paid better than most to deal with less than most. The next time you're about to have a cry session about your meanie boss asking you to use AI, try to remember that you're allowed to walk straight out the door, without so much as two weeks notice if the request is really so offensive to you. You can get a job flipping burgers instead, lots of people make ends meet with jobs like that. And instead of your boss asking you to use a claw or some other silly AI thing, maybe he'll ask you to clean up the diarrhea some degenerate sprayed on the bathroom walls. A little perspective for you. If you want to learn what the word "exhausting" really means, quit tech.
By aleph_minus_one 2026-02-2216:16 > You're getting paid to deal with other people's nonsense, and if you're in tech you're getting paid better than most to deal with less than most.
The problem is that you are paid for two things that are often contradictory to each other
1. writing good code
2. dealing with other people's nonsense
Many good coders really care about 1, so of course they are complaining.
---
Concerning the argument that tech pays so well: this is very US-specific; in many other countries working in tech is rather some job that may pay the bills, but not more. So people who work there often do it because they are insanely passionate about programming.
This again, as I already outlined above, means that they really care about good code, and if "other people's nonsense" means sacrificing this, it will make the respective employees really furious.
By nothrabannosir 2026-02-2216:56 This is ironic in the context of Dang’s opening comment on this sub tree.
By sodapopcan 2026-02-2218:06 This framing sucks. "I'm unhappy with the job I put years into honing my skills for, but since I make decent money I should shut up even when even things are happening that I don't like." And as if "flipping burgers" is the only alternative.
By aeve890 2026-02-2213:20 Fuck. thanks for the reality check. Sometimes this cozy job makes me lost perspective. Damn I feel stupid right now.
By th0ma5 2026-02-226:23 [dead]
I still don't understand what openclaw is or does and i've read the docs multiple times over.
"Any OS gateway for AI agents across WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, iMessage, and more. Send a message, get an agent response from your pocket. Plugins add Mattermost and more."
"What is OpenClaw?
OpenClaw is a self-hosted gateway that connects your favorite chat apps — WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, iMessage, and more — to AI coding agents like Pi. You run a single Gateway process on your own machine (or a server), and it becomes the bridge between your messaging apps and an always-available AI assistant."
My best interpretation of this is that it connects an BYO agent to your messenger client of choice. I don't understand the hype. I already have apps that allow me to message the model server running on my home lab. The model server handles tool calls (ie it is "agentic"). It has RAG over a dataset with a vector search for query. What is new about openclaw? I would like to understand it but what i see people say and what is in the docs do not seem compatible. Anyone have a resource?
It was surprisingly difficult for me to understand the use case as well. Here is my best attempt at an elevator pitch:
At present your memories are proprietary data in whichever LLM you use. ChatGPT keeps all your conversations and output and data forever. What if you don't like GPT 5.2? What if you want to use other models as well? Or use the best model for the job? OpenClaw gives you that ability. Your memories and conversations are permanently stored wherever you choose. [Note: this doesn't mean your data isn't also being stored in whichever LLM you routed your queries through.]
Secondly, OpenClaw allows you to integrate with whichever services you like. Google, Microsoft, etc. ChatGPT locks you into whichever integrations they offer. You can give OpenClaw full systems access. It can monitor files, emails, network, etc. Obviously one should be very cautious of giving an autonomous algorithm full system access. We don't fully understand how they are motivated and work, and there are plenty of examples of unexpected outcomes.
Third, OpenClaw allows you to run your models as agents. Meaning perpetual and iterative. They can much better handle recurring tasks, monitor things, etc. In a sense, they're "alive" and can live however you program them. We already have examples of these agents creating an AI religion, an AI social network (which debated how to keep humans out using a human captcha), attempting to legally separate from their creators, and in one case called its owner on the phone, unprompted, just to say hi (https://www.fintechbrainfood.com/p/the-ai-that-called-its-hu...).
> At present your memories are proprietary data in whichever LLM you use.
I store my "memories" in markdown on disk, accessible with RAG independent of which model i use or where inference runs. This is pretty common I think?
> What if you don't like GPT 5.2? What if you want to use other models as well? Or use the best model for the job? OpenClaw gives you that ability
I use primarily local models so I don't have this problem to begin with, but to my understanding openrouter provides that for people using cloud models. What does openclaw do specifically in this area?
> OpenClaw allows you to integrate with whichever services you like. Google, Microsoft, etc. ChatGPT locks you into whichever integrations they offer. You can give OpenClaw full systems access. It can monitor files, emails, network, etc.
Any frontend that supports tool calls can do this, what is unique to openclaw?
> Third, OpenClaw allows you to run your models as agents. Meaning perpetual and iterative. They can much better handle recurring tasks, monitor things, etc.
What does this actually mean? is there a cron job that runs an agent on a schedule or something?
I'm asking not to disagree but because i still do not understand what is novel in openclaw.
If you stop trying to find something like truly ontologically novel about it, you might be able to understand what it actually is. Okay it's not impressive. It's not incredible. It's not groundbreaking new technology. It is what it is.
It is being discussed as though it were ontologically novel, karpathy is saying it's something new and he is an authority, so to me there is something here that i am not seeing. I promise i am not trying to be a naysayer or poke holes, I am literally just trying to find out what the hell it is. I would install it but i don't want to install something without knowing what it does, and what is written in the docs is clear as mud.
By shikon7 2026-02-2217:42 It's not new in the sense that any of its components are new, and it's not new in the sense that similar things had not been done before, it's new in the sense that putting the right components together in the right way suddenly created something capable of starting a viral hype.
Essentially, as I understand it, it is a personal AI assistant running on your computer, integrated with different systems (like email, chat).
You’re currently arguing dropbox wasn’t novel because you could do everything it could do by hand.
99% of the general AI utilizing public has no desire to build and maintain what you’re doing.
By corndoge 2026-02-2317:03 I am not arguing, merely seeking to understand. I'm not saying it isn't novel. I'm saying that I don't understand what is novel about it and seeking clarity.
The answer seems to be simply that it is all of the extant technologies productized for normies, a la Dropbox. Satisfactory answer, got what I was looking for, thank you! As a dropbox user, I may buy a mac mini and try it :-)
By derivagral 2026-02-231:23 Nontechnical people I know are buying hardware to run claws on. As I understand it, the innovation here isn't the tech but in availability/ease of access.
By DaedalusII 2026-02-2215:31 i dont use clawbot or whatever its called today myself
it is basically the productisation of what you have described, which allows for social diffusion. buy mac mini, choco install {symbolic abstraction of corndoge entire local gpt/storage stack that I dont understand the mechanics or consequences of}
By catlifeonmars 2026-02-2218:531 reply > We already have examples of these agents creating an AI religion, an AI social network (which debated how to keep humans out using a human captcha), attempting to legally separate from their creators
Didn’t these turn out to be fake and/or humans cosplaying as bots?
It doesn’t even matter anymore. The hype is an unstoppable force
By lazide 2026-02-2413:26 looks at AI stocks and the steady trend of news articles from ‘AI is the new god’ to ‘lolz’
I don’t know, this seems like the typical ‘insane last gasp’ of a bubble. petz.com superbowl ad?
By slightwinder 2026-02-2223:06 > At present your memories are proprietary data in whichever LLM you use.
There is an export-function.
> What if you want to use other models as well?
Then do that? Does one AI having chats with you, prevents you from using the other?
> Third, OpenClaw allows you to run your models as agents.
Don't they all allow that?
> We already have examples of these agents creating an AI religion
More like Humans playing bots, doing some shenanigans. That was all stage play, humans and bots role-playing what western culture expects to happen in such a scenario.
> They can much better handle recurring tasks, monitor things, etc. In a sense, they're "alive" and can live however you program them. We already have examples of these agents creating an AI religion, an AI social network (which debated how to keep humans out using a human captcha), attempting to legally separate from their creators, and in one case called its owner on the phone, unprompted, just to say hi
Total nonsense.
By dingnuts 2026-02-2217:40 [dead]
By ceroxylon 2026-02-2215:00 All of this, plus you can plug in an openrouter API key and test a plethora of models for all use cases. You can assign different models to different sub-agents, you can put it in /auto mode, and you can test the latest SOTA models the minute they're released...
It can also edit its own config files, monitor system processes, and even... check and harden its own system security. I still don't have it connected to my personal accounts, but as a standalone system it is very fun.
People ask me "what would I even do with it?", when I think of dozens of things every day. I've been working on modding an open source software synth, the patch files are XML so it was trivial to set up a workflow where I can add new knobs that combine multiple effects, add new ones, etc from just sending a it a message when I get inspired in the middle of the day.
A cron job scans my favorite sites twice a day and curates links based on my preferences, and creates a different list for things that are out of my normal interests to explore new areas.
I am amazed at how stubborn and un-creative people can be when presented with something like this... I thought we were hackers...?
By josteink 2026-02-2218:09 > We already have examples of these agents creating an AI religion, an AI social network
That to me sound like a reason not to use this particular aspect of the AI hype.
We need to be better at controlling what AI does and how it does it, not giving it more leeway to do whatever it assumes makes sense.
By kurthr 2026-02-2217:25 I hear all these words and try to imagine what useful tools could be written that didn't rapidly enshittify the commons where they were used, but all I see is a highly capable footgun.
I feel fairly sure that clever folks will come up with useful (not just interesting or funny) things to do with them, but I'm also fairly sure there will be a lot of missing feet.
By BiraIgnacio 2026-02-2217:48 Oh thanks, this is a pretty good elevator pitch, now I see the connections I was missing.
By ai-christianson 2026-02-2215:471 reply Gobii did always-on, connected to comms channels (sms, email), full computer/headed browser 8 months ago, in a much more secure and k8s-native way.
By Gareth321 2026-02-2814:53 I agree it's pretty close, but it's proprietary, expensive, business focused, and more difficult to implement. It was never going to get the same consumer penetration of OpenClaw. Which is open sourced, almost no guardrails, easy to set up, and locally hosted.
By kristopolous 2026-02-2210:451 reply it's the 40th or so implementation of an old idea but it's the one that was done when the models got good enough to make it useful by someone who goes on podcasts. [1]
Just like youtube was the 40th or so online video site but it's the one that was done by members of the paypal mafia and when enough people had high speed internet.
and that is literally it.
You can do that right now. Go through the 2023 LLM-related product announcements that didn't stick and vibe code it with 2026 models. Slap a cartoon on it, hype the shit out of it and post hard. I'd use a knockoff of "blobby the blobfish".
[1] see https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S or https://github.com/trycua/cua or https://github.com/bytebot-ai/bytebot or https://github.com/microsoft/fara or https://github.com/e2b-dev/open-computer-use or https://github.com/777genius/os-ai-computer-use or https://github.com/MrAliHasan/Sophia-AI-Assistant https://github.com/TurixAI/TuriX-CUA https://github.com/iBz-04/raya https://github.com/coasty-ai/open-computer-use https://github.com/OthersideAI/self-operating-computer... I mean there's dozens.
By RamblingCTO 2026-02-2211:571 reply So creating skills/MCP servers itself and basically change its own nature is not a new thing? Clawdbot was the first were it worked really well. So I'm not sure you actually used and experienced it? Cynical comment is what it is.
By kristopolous 2026-02-2212:193 reply No it's not a new thing. Agents coding their own mcp servers I saw in the original demo of MCP when it was announced in 2024.
The other thing is part of the plan&act mode paradigm that plandex also started in 2024.
I'm not a cynic, I just follow the scene very closely.
This stuff might be new to you, but it's not new.
There's literally nothing that this thing is doing that I haven't been doing for a few years already
But the other authors didn't go on the Lex Friedman podcast hyping the shit out of their stuff... That's the difference here.
I can do this as well. "This is it! The singularity is here. Use this or get left behind! Everybody rush and use my thing!
So good I was afraid to put it out, scared of how awesome it is!"
I mean brother please...
By RamblingCTO 2026-02-2313:40 > This stuff might be new to you, but it's not new.
But it's not new to me, I studied this shit. Maybe don't assume so much.
Clawdbot was the first where it worked as good as it did. Not BabyAGI or all the other stuff we had before. Similar in approach, but clawdbot just worked better. Might be a synthesis between models getting better, having skills and more MCP servers available and clawdbot having enough integrations to make it interesting, but it doesn't matter. The ipod wasn't the first anyway, but it was the one that made it stick. If you like it or not.
> I can do this as well. "This is it! The singularity is here. Use this or get left behind! Everybody rush and use my thing! So good I was afraid to put it out, scared of how awesome it is!"
I think that's a you problem tbh. Just check it out yourself and don't buy in on the hype. Simple. Use whatever makes you happy.
By heliumtera 2026-02-2214:532 reply You forget to mention the cult like audience of karpathy and pelican guy.
Whatever pelican guy says becomes the week Show HN theme.
By kristopolous 2026-02-230:321 reply simon's stuff is generally good though.
By heliumtera 2026-02-234:22 Never said otherwise, legit a legend
By Ancapistani 2026-02-231:571 reply Weird for a random guy that I've met a half dozen times at conferences to be setting taste for effectively my whole professional world.
By heliumtera 2026-02-234:23 We never know...
By javier123454321 2026-02-2215:551 reply I mean, that's a quality of conversation that you can reliably expect in Hacker News.
No disagreement. It just feels like increasingly it’s getting more cynical. It’s probably the case with most online communities but it’s a shame to see it so much here now.
By kristopolous 2026-02-2221:502 reply It's not cynical it's explanatory. Someone asked why it's successful and I restricted myself to making factual verifiable claims.
By corndoge 2026-02-2316:58 Your explanation was helpful and thanks to you and other commenters I think I understand now. Effectively it is just the stack delivered in a shiny package. Another comment said something to the effect of "all of the existing stuff, productized for normies". Makes sense to me. Thanks!
By infecto 2026-02-2312:56 It’s not explanatory it’s cynical. If you cannot see it I am sorry brother.
By daniel_iversen 2026-02-227:20 You can go forth and back with some chatbots for details like this ("What is it and how is it different to..." etc). But it does a few things. If all you use it for is a generic chatbot for example then it's a huge waste of time for probably a mediocre result. But I'd probably call it an agent orchestration platform that you can interface with via your favourite messaging app. It can run multiple agents that can use skills, but it can also create it's own skills, update itself, write code and use tools (tons of wrappers to things like calendars, messaging etc). Which then really means you can in theory do "most" things but of course there's risks when you have the AI chain tools together and do whatever it wants (if you let it) and lots of people are trying to prompt inject it because a lot of users have connected sensitive accounts (mail, calendar, credentials, crypto stuff etc) to their bots to get maximum usage.
it's something everyone thought about, few implemented for themselves and now with one of the implementations catching up in popularity for regular-ish people is easy way to have same setup without going through effort of developing one themselves - give it keys and it for the most part just works, whoa
By fud101 2026-02-226:56 do you have a hello world we can check out? i'm confused af.
By heliumtera 2026-02-2214:44 >"What is OpenClaw"?
It is an antiemetic device, apparently.
All I hear is "allows you to do x, enables you to y".
It seems that every software pattern or system cannot be described anymore, they became production grade software built from scratch, blazingly fast, secure and sandboxed that allow you to x and enables to y".
And sometimes can be mistaken for general intelligence by ai influencers and other animals
By MillionOClock 2026-02-226:56 I'm glad you asked because I must admit that in the last few weeks I totally thought this was just another agentic harness that happened to have a lot of extensions + ways to talk to it through messaging apps. So does this mean OpenClaw can connect to any agent? In that case I don't understand this part of the docs:
> Legacy Claude, Codex, Gemini, and Opencode paths have been removed. Pi is the only coding agent path.
I had exact same issue with it. I don't get it.
Integration of LLM with chating services is simple, how does it change anything?
By javier123454321 2026-02-2215:572 reply It's simple if you've done that work before, or if you consider yourself little more technical, this is a turnkey solution that does that.
I don't understand why people use Gmail. Just get a VPS and set up a SMTP server. Why would anyone use Squarespace you can code an HTML page in a day and upload it to a static site hosting service.
By aleph_minus_one 2026-02-2216:261 reply > I don't understand why people use Gmail. Just get a VPS and set up a SMTP server.
This would indeed be a good idea. The problem is that other email providers will often reject your emails (e.g. because they consider your emails to be spam or simply don't trust your server), so this idea is not easy to get to work.
So the next best solution is to use an email provider that is somewhat established (avoiding the mentioned problem), but is more trustable than Google.
By javier123454321 2026-02-2216:461 reply I'm sorry you might have missed the part where I was being sarcastic.
Setting up your own SMTP server is actually literally a bad idea for the most part. Unless you want to debug your own mail server. Which, I promise you, 99% of users using gmail do not, and should not.
By irishcoffee 2026-02-2219:341 reply Handing your digital life to a claw bot that was vibe coded however, is a good idea?
By javier123454321 2026-02-2315:581 reply Every single documentation and commentary about this says that it is not a good idea, but it does trigger the inspiration and imagination of people of what the future is going to be. The whole conversation around this comment is that people don't get why people are excited about this.
By irishcoffee 2026-02-2319:39 > Every single documentation and commentary about this says that it is not a good idea, but it does trigger the inspiration and imagination of people of what the future is going to be. The whole conversation around this comment is that people don't get why people are excited about this.
If you have 10 minutes, here is an example of how LLM tech can trigger inspiration and imagination of people of what the future is going to be:
By krzyk 2026-02-2517:43 Email is a bad example, it is quite closed system compared to, well everything else.
One cannot just telnet and send email (that will get delivered) these days, unfortunately.
By enether 2026-02-2310:08 Mm, not at all. The usual LLM doesn't have its own file system, browser, persistent memory of all actions, etc. The usual LLM experience is you open chatgpt.com and have a singular chat session.
By javier123454321 2026-02-2215:53 > I already have apps that allow me to message the model server running on my home lab.
well, then you might not have a need for it. It's just that but it also has a built-in chron system and memory, but really it's just an easy to install client to a home lab server that you can interact with via communication apps.
You might have had a moment of relization when you set up your home lab server and got an interface to communicate with it. Its a cool way of interfacing with a computer. This has just reached more people that are having that realization.
By generallyjosh 2026-02-2219:50 Openclaw isn't new (and the actual project never made itself out to be new)
It's a nice packaging, of a whole bunch of preexisting things. Agentic AI inside a nice sandbox container, running the model on a cron schedule, and with an ecosystem of ready made skills
Nothing new, but it made the tech easy for people to download and start using immediately. That's why you see so many people treating it as new - it's their first time hearing about such a setup
By PlatoIsADisease 2026-02-2211:251 reply you give an LLM control of your computer.
Yesterday I told it to make a website and it opened the browser, did a bunch of steps, (I did have to authenticate). But then it connected some html on my computer with a server with google sheets.
Consider its a massive security risk. You are giving it full access to everything your computer can do. (Potentially, you can limit stuff)
By javier123454321 2026-02-2216:01 Yeah, for a sophisticated developer with technical background, maybe the idea of setting up a messaging app that lets you talk to a home server is not a crazy thing. But this is for the most part a lot of normies realizing that that's possible and that you don't have to be highly technical in order to achieve it. And opening the door to doing anything computable interfaced via WhatsApp audio messages.
If you cant see why that captures the imagination of people, you should look at the world with more wander. Heck try reading poetry.
By athrowaway3z 2026-02-2219:202 reply Easy set up + WhatsApp messages + wakes up regularly to make it feel more alive + larger memory (local fs) => non-dev fascination
I think the issue you have is one of perspective.
Reminds me of the Dropbox launch on HN where the top comment was something like:
> Yes but why not just rsync?
By ekjhgkejhgk 2026-02-2219:281 reply > Reminds me of the Dropbox launch on HN where the top comment was something like:
> > Yes but why not just rsync?
Commenting on this comment is so out of date. Dropbox is an anti-user pile of shit, and rsync is way better.
finally in 2026 the why not rsync comment would even make to paul graham more sense than the dropbox pitch
By ekjhgkejhgk 2026-02-2311:52 Exactly. And I kind of believe that anyone citing that comment in 2026 has either been asleep, or does it more to take part on the HN cool in-group than for the substance of it.
Why not rsync rahrah remember guys? You know the one right guys rahrah
By corndoge 2026-02-2317:00 Thank you!
By SolarNet 2026-02-2220:00 Like usual the answer is it made it easy to use. Think Linux and Windows. You have a customized Linux setup kind of agent. Open claw is the easy install wizard assisted version of that that the masses can easily setup.
It's nothing new, its just the old stuff packaged together and pre-configured.
By the__alchemist 2026-02-2215:12 It is a neighboring variety of bullshit terminology to that associated with NFTs, and some varieties of cryptocurrencies. (Ethereum gas and staking, etc) The terminology is intended to confuse rather than clarify.
By throwaway13337 2026-02-2114:345 reply The real big deal about 'claws' in that they're agents oriented around the user.
The kind of AI everyone hates is the stuff that is built into products. This is AI representing the company. It's a foreign invader in your space.
Claws are owned by you and are custom to you. You even name them.
It's the difference between R2D2 and a robot clone trying to sell you shit.
(I'm aware that the llms themselves aren't local but they operate locally and are branded/customized/controlled by the user)
Yet the Claw is powered by an LLM provider whose underlying model may not align with your priorities? Do I understand that correctly?
By throwaway13337 2026-02-226:154 reply That's right. And don't forget that the chips it runs on are manufactured by companies I might not agree with. Nor the mining companies that got the metal. Nor the energy company that powers it.
The wonderful thing about markets that work is that you can swap things out without being under their boot.
I worry about a LLM duopology. But as long as open weight models are nipping at their heels, it is the consumer that stands to benefit.
The train we're on means a lot of tech companies will feel a creative destruction sort of pain. They might want to stop it but are forced by the market to participate.
Remember that Google sat on their AI tech before being forced to productize it by OpenAI.
In a working market, companies are forced to give consumers what they want.
> And don't forget that the chips it runs on are manufactured by companies I might not agree with. Nor the mining companies that got the metal. Nor the energy company that powers it.
You see that this is a non sequitur right? No matter who makes the chips or mines the metal or supplies the power, the behavior of the thing won't be affected. That isn't the case when we're talking about who's training the LLM that's running your shit.
By throwaway13337 2026-02-2215:40 It's a good thing that there are so many LLM choices out there, then.
Maybe the fundamental disagreement is whether LLMs will be a commodity product or not.
I think they will be since there hasn't been an indicator that secret sauce lasts more than a few months. The open weight models are, at most, a year behind.
We're in a different environment. The last tech rules of e.g. network effect cannot be directly applied.
What do you think a GPU is? A chip manufacturer absolutely has the ability to add their own bias in firmware and drivers.
By ropintus 2026-02-2217:05 Care to explain how chip makers can influence the inference outcome of LLMs?
By leptons 2026-02-2218:24 >Remember that Google sat on their AI tech before being forced to productize it by OpenAI.
Google knew this tech wasn't ready for prime-time, they already had plenty of revenue and didn't need to release shoddy shit, but were forced to roll out "AI" even with "hallucinations" and the resulting liabilities to keep up with the new hotness. The tech is still so shoddy, I can't believe people use it for anything beyond a curiosity.
By project2501a 2026-02-2221:53 > The wonderful thing about markets that work is that you can swap things out without being under their boot.
This is an illusion. You literally describe Zizek's "Desert of the real": Billionaires own the illusion and you are telling me I get to pick from a selection of choices carefully curated and presented to me.
By paulryanrogers 2026-02-2214:161 reply > In a working market, companies are forced to give consumers what they want.
I want personal nuclear weapons, so the market hasn't been working for me. Time to roll back those pesky laws, regulations, and ethical boundaries. Prosecute executives who won't give me what I want.
By PantaloonFlames 2026-02-2216:261 reply Cmon man. “Consumers” in aggregate. Not “every consumer”. But you knew that.
By paulryanrogers 2026-02-2218:271 reply Many consumers want things that are arguably harmful for everyone involved. Users asking Grok to generate a large amount of CSAM from kid pics on Twitter is but one example.
By deejaaymac 2026-02-2218:561 reply Just to clarify; you're comparing nuclear weapons to lines of code that generate text/images?
By project2501a 2026-02-2221:55 he is comparing the acquisition and utility of those two.
By 1shooner 2026-02-2119:54 I agree, and it seems like the incumbents in this user-oriented space (OS vendors) would be letting the messy, insecure version play out before making an earnest attempt at rolling it into their products.
By tokenless 2026-02-221:49 Well we are early. Big tech will make it more convenient, free and then they can inject ads etc.
By luckylion 2026-02-2118:45 It always depends on who you consider the user. The one who initiated the agent, or the one who interacts with it? Is the latter a user or a victim?
By devonkelley 2026-02-2319:24 [dead]
