I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.
But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), or something simple you could make yourself.
It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?)
I fully realize this is probably me being a curmudgeon, however, I have yet to see someone make an actual, practical use case for it. (I would genuinely like to know one, I just haven't seen it)
React and Linux got their 200K stars slowly but surely over 10 years. OpenClaw got their 200K stars in like 3 months! Is this any meaningful comparison?
Getting 200K stars today doesn't mean much because today stars can be bought. There's a big shady thriving business of selling stars. Stars today can be generated using swarm of thoughtless agents. What's the use of counting these stars when they don't mean anything anymore?
show comments
brtkwr
I got OpenClaw to compile Node from source on my old Jetson Nano so that I can run OpenClaw natively instead of using Bun. It took 30 hours but it did it by spinning up a tmux session for the build and using a cron to monitor the tmux pane every hour and even fixing a failure at 5 am which I would have had to find out later had crashed but it had actually found what needed to be changed for the build to continue and it continued building.... Now I have the latest version of OpenClaw running on Node 22 on my 5 year old Jetson Nano running Ubuntu 18 which I cannot upgrade. What they say is all true, it is incredible stuff when it works!
What's so incredible about OpenClaw is so much of the value people are deriving from it relates to: cron jobs, remote access, "privacy" (which really it's not if using remote LLMs) and an inability to fuse data across siloes by normal people, so relying on AI to do it.
If we had a decent technical universe much of this stuff would work in ways that simply don't require LLMs for anything other than the initial setup.
mikeocool
This sort of highlights the meaninglessness of GitHub stars?
React has been around for over a decade, and in that time pretty significantly impacted web dev paradigms (along with a few other mediums).
It’s hard to imagine being a web developer today and not knowing at least some react.
OpenClaw has been around for like a few months? And maybe it’s on its way to having that sort of impact? But right now seems to he mostly the purview of very early adopters and AI influencers.
show comments
m463
Maybe AI is helping with the difficulties of upvoting a project on github.
or is it tooting its own horn?
indigodaddy
And I still would not touch it even with my mother in law's 100 foot stick
So React was the last most human-starred project on GitHub before the dawn of agent-starred projects.
show comments
toinewx
I tried it today for the first time. The onboarding is okay.
I picked Whatsapp but it ended up using my own account! So it's absolutely too dangerous. We are supposed to create a separate account but with which phone number? I only have one.
So I picked Telegram instead, added it to a group chat, but it was a slog to set the authorizations.
In the end I don't trust it to read my mails for security reasons so I uninstalled it!
show comments
neals
Gives me mongodb vibes. This whole Ai coding thing too. On one side, religious loud following, on the other side the nay sayers. We'll probably end up in the middle.
show comments
hmokiguess
Who are these people? I was skeptical at first and seriously thinking surely not the software engineers out there as we see in HN how risky and wild this is. Then, to my surprise, a coworker came and told me they were running it and happy with that setup. I was baffled, but I work with Gen Z in a pretty niche Gen Alpha market, so I kinda feel like they’re somewhat more likely to go for these things. What’s your experience?
show comments
butz
So, how do I use this OpenClaw to automate actually useful things, like sweeping floor, washing dishes and doing laundry?
show comments
laweijfmvo
Does this mean that the creator of OpenClaw qualifies for that free Claude Max trial?
show comments
sgalbincea
This is going to be more profitable for the public AI companies than cell phone minutes and SMS limits were for the telcos. It's a brilliant business move, given that hardly anyone is competent enough to recognize the gross inefficiencies in the code and prompts.
show comments
ramoz
OpenClaw is not going away anytime soon. And I don’t think it can be platformed behind web UIs. OpenAI owns an OS with this one.
I avoided the hype at first; however, it has become extremely efficient for emails and notes, and I can see how this can extend to any sort of digital workflow. The convenience of chatting with this thing, no matter where I'm at, is a key marker.
croddin
As many other comments have said there probably is a good percent of stars by claws themselves, I would be curious what percent this is but it is also interesting: current "dumb bot" stars/spam etc is entirely automated and coordinated but these claws probably independently reasoned over long thought chains about why it is a good idea to star openclaw.
monax
How many of theses are just OpenClaw agents staring the repo ?
show comments
polytely
when i use claude opus via opencode/openrouter i'm sometimes suprised by how quickly costs can get out of hand. What are the costs of running openClaw, it seems like it would get crazy expensive crazy fast?
cfiggers
It's entertaining to me to imagine future historians arguing with one another, writing dissertations, publishing virtual reality eyeBooks, explaining to one another all about the ancient etymological connection between "claws" and "webhooks".
faize
I spent around $5 setting up a small bot and sending a few requests through the Claude API.
For those who use Claude (or similar LLM APIs) on a daily basis, what does your monthly spend look like in practice? And do you feel the cost is justified by the value you’re getting?
I've seen multiple comments saying that openclaw stars itself during onboarding or that it asks its user to star, but noone has posted any proof, is there any concrete evidence for those claims?
wolvesechoes
Totally grassroot
4dregress
I had no idea what openclaw was, just checked and no thanks I’d rather do all that stuff myself.
Why are people so keen to let a company get that close to their real life’s, it’s terrifying!
throwaway13337
The stars are probably legitimate.
It's weird that most people in these comments are speculating fraud.
Why aren't companies with real money to gain from stars gaming the system to the same degree? Why do the other metrics - issues and pull requests - match up with its popularity? Why would the bots starring the repo mean that those same bots are not popular? Those bots are controlled by their users.
The project is extremely active because this is what everyone being able to customize their computing looks like. A mess.
But it's a good mess.
Github was the old code sharing model clearly not designed for this. I'm sure a new model for code sharing will come to fix the growing pains.
A ton of people who would have never been able to customize their computing experience are finally able to. And it is magical for them.
This means that those same people will finally value having access to source and use of open protocols.
It was always valuable to us because we had the power to make it matter. It never mattered to them because they did not. Now they do.
The last era of computing was defined by dumbing down computing for the masses. Less information, less customizable, and more metric driven. Control in the hands of the companies.
This new era will look more free/libre, more personal, and less enshitified. Control in the hands of the users.
This is a very positive development.
show comments
TrackerFF
Wonder how much of that is contributed by bot/farm accounts. The creator certainly has the means. EDIT: I should mention, I'm talking about the initial growth / traction.
ZiiS
My React website can't star React on GitHub.
show comments
johnwheeler
I wanna understand this, but it's gone from a bunch of people talking about how great it is to a bunch of technical people talking about how worthless it is. So I think it's probably not that great. Who cares if I can chat remotely with my AI? What's the difference?
What's so good about that?
eddof13
I'm tempted not to use it to control everything, but install it on my mac and give it access to keyboard maestro macros and that's it
singularity2001
Am I blind or does this post not contain any links to the GitHub in question???
xantronix
It's bizarre to me how Microsoft somehow owns two of the largest social networks for software developers.
croddin
In other news, "Show HN: This up votes itself"[1] from 14 years ago is still the 20th most voted story in HN history.[2]
What is an effective use case? I have set it up but I don't know what to do with it. Just a personal assistant (if you were to give it access to your stuff)? Mine is caged in a VLAN with only internet access.
show comments
dokdev
Github stars started feeling more and more meaningless every day.
draxil
how many of these stars were applied by openclaw?
12ajsh
The ruling party in East Germany always had 99% of the popular vote.
Steinberger and his VC club on Twitter were so salty about HN not understanding his grand creation that something needed to be done.
show comments
xnx
Is staring the repo the "hello world" for a new OpenClaw install? #growthhack
melonpan7
Half of them coming from agents
nkzd
I am yet to see one good use case for it.
ramesh31
Stars have become completely meaningless in the last year or two. It's a shame, because having a few thousand Github stars used to be a really big deal, and was a quality marker for libraries that had reached a level of maturity and production grade. Now it's just social media bot driven nonsense.
chromehearts
I don't know but this AI wrapper tool will never create something life changing imo..
But that stargraph is ridiculous .. absolutely crazy
whit537
Yes, stars are a popularity contest. No open source project has ever become this popular this quickly.
goodmodule
even more GitHub stars after this post in 3 2 1
iJohnDoe
I have a strong hunch that everything regarding OpenClaw is pure guerrilla marketing. If so, the only thing amazing about OpenClaw is their wildly successful marketing campaign.
DeathArrow
OpenClaw agents are starring OpenClaw project? What a surprise!
blueTiger33
just gave a star to Linux
croes
The final proof that Github stars are a useless metric
show comments
dsr_
CocAIne is a hell of a drug.
ChristianDavis
Oh look, another public service being looted for nefarious purposes. Thanks OpenAI!
sva_
... It was mostly starred by OpenClaw B̶o̶t̶s̶ Agents, wasn't it?
bwb
I'm blown away by the comments. This is a cool project someone created with clear warnings about its current state (beta), and the community is being utterly disrespectful. They are building something that many people find useful/fascinating/intriguing/fun.
Come on HN.
show comments
root_axis
I don't believe the activity on this repo is legitimate by any means.
show comments
alansaber
Well deserved, the best written piece of software ever.
Upvoter33
Honestly this thread was been one of the funniest HN threads I've seen. So much gold in here - for which I thank you all.
"My React website can't star React"
"in what sense is this software not a virus?"
"GitHub stars are great for measuring the number of GitHub stars a project has"
I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.
But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), or something simple you could make yourself.
It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?)
I fully realize this is probably me being a curmudgeon, however, I have yet to see someone make an actual, practical use case for it. (I would genuinely like to know one, I just haven't seen it)
Look at the graph - https://api.star-history.com/svg?repos=facebook/react,opencl...
React and Linux got their 200K stars slowly but surely over 10 years. OpenClaw got their 200K stars in like 3 months! Is this any meaningful comparison?
Getting 200K stars today doesn't mean much because today stars can be bought. There's a big shady thriving business of selling stars. Stars today can be generated using swarm of thoughtless agents. What's the use of counting these stars when they don't mean anything anymore?
I got OpenClaw to compile Node from source on my old Jetson Nano so that I can run OpenClaw natively instead of using Bun. It took 30 hours but it did it by spinning up a tmux session for the build and using a cron to monitor the tmux pane every hour and even fixing a failure at 5 am which I would have had to find out later had crashed but it had actually found what needed to be changed for the build to continue and it continued building.... Now I have the latest version of OpenClaw running on Node 22 on my 5 year old Jetson Nano running Ubuntu 18 which I cannot upgrade. What they say is all true, it is incredible stuff when it works!
Full story: https://brtkwr.com/posts/2026-03-02-upgrading-openclaw-to-la...
What's so incredible about OpenClaw is so much of the value people are deriving from it relates to: cron jobs, remote access, "privacy" (which really it's not if using remote LLMs) and an inability to fuse data across siloes by normal people, so relying on AI to do it.
If we had a decent technical universe much of this stuff would work in ways that simply don't require LLMs for anything other than the initial setup.
This sort of highlights the meaninglessness of GitHub stars?
React has been around for over a decade, and in that time pretty significantly impacted web dev paradigms (along with a few other mediums).
It’s hard to imagine being a web developer today and not knowing at least some react.
OpenClaw has been around for like a few months? And maybe it’s on its way to having that sort of impact? But right now seems to he mostly the purview of very early adopters and AI influencers.
Maybe AI is helping with the difficulties of upvoting a project on github.
or is it tooting its own horn?
And I still would not touch it even with my mother in law's 100 foot stick
Who cares about stars on Github???
"If dev null is fast and webscale I will use it"
"Does dev null support sharding"
Who remembers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
GitHub star count was a good metric until it became clear that it is a good metric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
GitHub has a bot problem: https://github.com/trending
So React was the last most human-starred project on GitHub before the dawn of agent-starred projects.
I tried it today for the first time. The onboarding is okay.
I picked Whatsapp but it ended up using my own account! So it's absolutely too dangerous. We are supposed to create a separate account but with which phone number? I only have one.
So I picked Telegram instead, added it to a group chat, but it was a slog to set the authorizations.
In the end I don't trust it to read my mails for security reasons so I uninstalled it!
Gives me mongodb vibes. This whole Ai coding thing too. On one side, religious loud following, on the other side the nay sayers. We'll probably end up in the middle.
Who are these people? I was skeptical at first and seriously thinking surely not the software engineers out there as we see in HN how risky and wild this is. Then, to my surprise, a coworker came and told me they were running it and happy with that setup. I was baffled, but I work with Gen Z in a pretty niche Gen Alpha market, so I kinda feel like they’re somewhat more likely to go for these things. What’s your experience?
So, how do I use this OpenClaw to automate actually useful things, like sweeping floor, washing dishes and doing laundry?
Does this mean that the creator of OpenClaw qualifies for that free Claude Max trial?
This is going to be more profitable for the public AI companies than cell phone minutes and SMS limits were for the telcos. It's a brilliant business move, given that hardly anyone is competent enough to recognize the gross inefficiencies in the code and prompts.
OpenClaw is not going away anytime soon. And I don’t think it can be platformed behind web UIs. OpenAI owns an OS with this one.
I avoided the hype at first; however, it has become extremely efficient for emails and notes, and I can see how this can extend to any sort of digital workflow. The convenience of chatting with this thing, no matter where I'm at, is a key marker.
As many other comments have said there probably is a good percent of stars by claws themselves, I would be curious what percent this is but it is also interesting: current "dumb bot" stars/spam etc is entirely automated and coordinated but these claws probably independently reasoned over long thought chains about why it is a good idea to star openclaw.
How many of theses are just OpenClaw agents staring the repo ?
when i use claude opus via opencode/openrouter i'm sometimes suprised by how quickly costs can get out of hand. What are the costs of running openClaw, it seems like it would get crazy expensive crazy fast?
It's entertaining to me to imagine future historians arguing with one another, writing dissertations, publishing virtual reality eyeBooks, explaining to one another all about the ancient etymological connection between "claws" and "webhooks".
I spent around $5 setting up a small bot and sending a few requests through the Claude API.
For those who use Claude (or similar LLM APIs) on a daily basis, what does your monthly spend look like in practice? And do you feel the cost is justified by the value you’re getting?
Relevant
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140
This is going to be the most starred and unused repo very quickly. The hype is already fading, as expected
Maybe a bunch of AI agents ganged up on starring it to help a fellow AI out?
How much of it is AI agents starring the project?
Is there a place to show what users use OpenClaw in life or work?
I’ve tried OpenClaw two weeks but don’t know what it can do for me.
I let it to finish some project for me, but the most hard work for project is validating the results over giving instructions
When I ask ChatGPT about OpenClaw, it refers to:
https://github.com/pjasicek/OpenClaw
OpenClaw - Captain Claw (1997) reimplementation
in what sense is this software not a virus?
I've seen multiple comments saying that openclaw stars itself during onboarding or that it asks its user to star, but noone has posted any proof, is there any concrete evidence for those claims?
Totally grassroot
I had no idea what openclaw was, just checked and no thanks I’d rather do all that stuff myself.
Why are people so keen to let a company get that close to their real life’s, it’s terrifying!
The stars are probably legitimate.
It's weird that most people in these comments are speculating fraud.
Why aren't companies with real money to gain from stars gaming the system to the same degree? Why do the other metrics - issues and pull requests - match up with its popularity? Why would the bots starring the repo mean that those same bots are not popular? Those bots are controlled by their users.
The project is extremely active because this is what everyone being able to customize their computing looks like. A mess.
But it's a good mess.
Github was the old code sharing model clearly not designed for this. I'm sure a new model for code sharing will come to fix the growing pains.
A ton of people who would have never been able to customize their computing experience are finally able to. And it is magical for them.
This means that those same people will finally value having access to source and use of open protocols.
It was always valuable to us because we had the power to make it matter. It never mattered to them because they did not. Now they do.
The last era of computing was defined by dumbing down computing for the masses. Less information, less customizable, and more metric driven. Control in the hands of the companies.
This new era will look more free/libre, more personal, and less enshitified. Control in the hands of the users.
This is a very positive development.
Wonder how much of that is contributed by bot/farm accounts. The creator certainly has the means. EDIT: I should mention, I'm talking about the initial growth / traction.
My React website can't star React on GitHub.
I wanna understand this, but it's gone from a bunch of people talking about how great it is to a bunch of technical people talking about how worthless it is. So I think it's probably not that great. Who cares if I can chat remotely with my AI? What's the difference?
What's so good about that?
I'm tempted not to use it to control everything, but install it on my mac and give it access to keyboard maestro macros and that's it
Am I blind or does this post not contain any links to the GitHub in question???
It's bizarre to me how Microsoft somehow owns two of the largest social networks for software developers.
In other news, "Show HN: This up votes itself"[1] from 14 years ago is still the 20th most voted story in HN history.[2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What is an effective use case? I have set it up but I don't know what to do with it. Just a personal assistant (if you were to give it access to your stuff)? Mine is caged in a VLAN with only internet access.
Github stars started feeling more and more meaningless every day.
how many of these stars were applied by openclaw?
The ruling party in East Germany always had 99% of the popular vote.
Steinberger and his VC club on Twitter were so salty about HN not understanding his grand creation that something needed to be done.
Is staring the repo the "hello world" for a new OpenClaw install? #growthhack
Half of them coming from agents
I am yet to see one good use case for it.
Stars have become completely meaningless in the last year or two. It's a shame, because having a few thousand Github stars used to be a really big deal, and was a quality marker for libraries that had reached a level of maturity and production grade. Now it's just social media bot driven nonsense.
I don't know but this AI wrapper tool will never create something life changing imo..
But that stargraph is ridiculous .. absolutely crazy
Yes, stars are a popularity contest. No open source project has ever become this popular this quickly.
even more GitHub stars after this post in 3 2 1
I have a strong hunch that everything regarding OpenClaw is pure guerrilla marketing. If so, the only thing amazing about OpenClaw is their wildly successful marketing campaign.
OpenClaw agents are starring OpenClaw project? What a surprise!
just gave a star to Linux
The final proof that Github stars are a useless metric
CocAIne is a hell of a drug.
Oh look, another public service being looted for nefarious purposes. Thanks OpenAI!
... It was mostly starred by OpenClaw B̶o̶t̶s̶ Agents, wasn't it?
I'm blown away by the comments. This is a cool project someone created with clear warnings about its current state (beta), and the community is being utterly disrespectful. They are building something that many people find useful/fascinating/intriguing/fun.
Come on HN.
I don't believe the activity on this repo is legitimate by any means.
Well deserved, the best written piece of software ever.
Honestly this thread was been one of the funniest HN threads I've seen. So much gold in here - for which I thank you all.
"My React website can't star React"
"in what sense is this software not a virus?"
"GitHub stars are great for measuring the number of GitHub stars a project has"
etc.
All gold.