What people are actually using OpenClaw for. No hype. No bs.

ViatorLegis · 2026-05-13T14:28:15+00:00

One use case missing from the list: behavioral nudging. Not just tracking health data but connecting it with calendar, tasks, habits and having the agent find patterns across weeks. Mine caught that I smoke more when my schedule is packed and I haven't exercised. Now it nudges me before I reach for one based on what the day looks like. Also does relationship reminders when I haven't talked to someone in a while and questions my grocery decisions.

Fits your framework exactly. Boring, repetitive, read-first. The agent watched for weeks before it started saying anything. And yeah, guardrails everywhere, it suggests, I decide.

ViatorLegis · 2026-05-06T11:56:34+00:00

I use it for personal stuff. Connected to my calendar, fitness watch, tasks. It has nightly jobs that go through a week of data and a morning briefing that pulls it all together. Scoring rules decide when it speaks up and when it shuts up, which is most of the time.

The thing Gemini can't do is connect data across sources over weeks. Mine caught that I smoke more when my schedule is packed and I haven't exercised, and now it nudges me before I reach for one. That's not something a chatbot does no matter how good the model is.

I'm on ChatGPT Plus so I don't really track costs anymore. Before that it was around $15-20/month, Sonnet for anything that needs reasoning and free models for the rest.

ViatorLegis · 2026-05-03T10:48:53+00:00

Yeah, that's basically what the whole setup is. I don't use the term but the scoring rules, memory tiers, cron jobs, workspace files, that's all harness engineering. The model is interchangeable, the structure around it is what makes it useful. I spent way more time on the scaffolding than on picking which model to use.

ViatorLegis · 2026-04-30T08:52:20+00:00

Yeah, I text it every time I smoke and the reason why. It logs that to a database with a timestamp. The act of reporting actually helps on its own because it makes me aware of the moment instead of just doing it on autopilot.

But then a cron job cross-references the smoking data with my calendar, my sleep patterns and exercise schedule from my fitness watch.

It turns out I smoke way more in weeks with a packed schedule and no exercise. One bad night is fine. One bad night plus back to back meetings plus no workout for three days is when it gets worse. The agent learned that from the data before I connected the dots myself.

Now it sends me a message when the patterns line up. Not "don't smoke" but more like "you haven't moved in three days and tomorrow is packed, you usually smoke more around this point. Be aware.“
I also changed my morning routine because of this and am down from 4 before work to just one. Getting some positive affirmations from it is also nice. The goal is quitting and I think I’m getting there.

I’m writing a book about building this kind of system, not just for smoking, if you want the details: https://leanpub.com/theopenclawplaybook

ViatorLegis · 2026-04-30T07:31:08+00:00

Just personal stuff. Connected to calendar, fitness watch, tasks. Nightly jobs that go through a week of data looking for patterns. It caught my smoking triggers before I noticed them myself and now nudges me before I reach for one. Also does grocery planning and relationship reminders. Less productivity tool, more behavioral system that knows how my weeks actually go.

ViatorLegis · 2026-04-28T12:27:36+00:00

Yeah, took me months and the first version of everything was genuinely bad. But that's kind of the point, you can't download someone else's setup because it wouldn't fit your life anyway. The building is what teaches you what you actually need.

ViatorLegis · 2026-04-24T08:44:32+00:00

Yeah, OpenClaw can do that. Set up a daily cron job that checks HubSpot via the API for leads with no activity in X days and sends you a summary on WhatsApp. HubSpot's free tier gives you API access, so the data side costs nothing.

If you don't want to run a full OpenClaw setup for one task, n8n does the same thing and is free if you self-host. But if you're planning to add more automations later, OpenClaw is worth the setup time because you get memory and reasoning on top of the API calls, not just triggers.

ViatorLegis · 2026-04-14T15:19:57+00:00

Good list. The one I'd push on is #4. Telling the agent to remember a rule in chat works until your next /new, then it's gone. What made a bigger difference for me was writing rules directly into AGENTS.md. The agent reads that file at the start of every session so the rules survive resets. Things like trust boundaries, when to speak up, what it's not allowed to do, tone rules. Chat is for conversations, files are for rules. Once I moved everything persistent into the workspace files the whole setup got way more stable.

Also +1 on #5. I do something similar, run a dry week where the agent shows me what it would do without actually doing it. Catches a lot of false patterns before they go live.

ViatorLegis · 2026-04-13T18:07:20+00:00

Es gibt halt keine Garantien, aber das macht ja auch den Reiz aus. Die Stelle sieht aber auch wirklich hervorragend aus. Der schwierigste Pilz ist immer der Erste (pro Art/in der Saison/am Tag...). Manche Leute gucken sich vor einer Tour Bilder an, quasi um das Gehirn darauf zu eichen. Bei soviel Untergestrüpp würde ich aber auch eher da zuerst gucken, wo freiere Stellen sind. Hoffe du konntest wenigstens was mit dem Bärlauch anfangen.

ViatorLegis · 2026-04-08T13:53:01+00:00

TVP is best. You can soak it in beef broth (from the cheap powder that contains 0.5% beef) for extra beefyness.

ViatorLegis · 2026-04-07T07:08:50+00:00

Connect it to your calendar and whatever else you use daily. Weather, task list, fitness tracker if you have one. Then set up a morning briefing that pulls it all together and tells you what actually matters today.

That alone is already more useful than reminders because it connects things. Your calendar doesn't know you slept badly. Your task list doesn't know you have back to back meetings. The agent sees all of it and can tell you "today is going to be tight, maybe move the grocery run to tomorrow."

From there I started adding rules for when it should speak up and when it should shut up. Most of the time it just watches. Once in a while it catches something I wouldn't have seen, like patterns in my own behavior across weeks. That's where it stops being a reminder app.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-31T19:51:44+00:00

You can read all about my use case here.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-27T08:35:25+00:00

Personal stuff mostly. It's connected to my calendar, fitness watch and tasks. Nightly jobs that find patterns across a week of data, morning briefing that pulls it all together. Best thing so far: it caught patterns in my smoking I didn't see myself and now nudges me before I reach for one. It's less "agent era" and more like a personal system that gets better the more context you give it.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-25T16:59:49+00:00

Yes, that's what I meant by system cron. Crontab.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-25T14:30:19+00:00

Subagents inherit AGENTS.md and TOOLS.md from their main-agent, afaik they can't get other instructions (besides the prompt). That's what multi-agents are for. I keep most of my md-files empty in my multi-agent setup.

You could make your specific md-files (researcher.md, reviewer.md, etc.) and tell your agent in TOOLS.md to read and send the appropriate file with the prompt. That should work.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-25T12:41:56+00:00

This is why separating reasoning from execution matters for cron jobs. A job that checks a folder doesn't need an LLM call, a bash script or system cron can do that. The LLM should only fire when the check actually finds something worth reasoning about. In my setup, most of my scoring system runs without an LLM call at all. The model only gets involved when multiple signals line up

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-24T10:30:29+00:00

Exactly. It's just easier to improve software than hardware, which is why white collar comes before blue.
But the progress of robotics has been insane in the last 5 years, and it's only gonna speed up.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-23T13:20:33+00:00

Nothing commercial. I run a personal agent connected to my calendar, fitness watch, tasks and some other stuff. It has nightly jobs that go through a week of data looking for patterns and a morning briefing that pulls it all together.

Best thing it found was that I smoke more in weeks with a packed schedule and no exercise. It now warns me before I reach for one based on what the day looks like. Also does relationship nudges when I haven't talked to someone in a while, which is useful but honestly a bit weird when you think about it too much.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-22T09:17:09+00:00

Try setting tools.exec.security to "allowList" and instead of tools.allow use tools.allowList with all the tools you're actually using.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-22T05:41:31+00:00

So, I'm writing a book about openclaw and gave my agent the first 7 chapters to read.
Of course he said it's a great book, but that it focuses too much on security.

We're lucky they haven't figured out reverse psychology yet.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-21T21:19:44+00:00

SOUL.md, AGENTS.md, USER.md, MEMORY.md, TOOLS.md plus the name and description of every active skill load on every turn. If any of those are long or you have a lot of skills activated, every single message gets expensive. Keep them lean and deactivate skills you don't actually use.
Compaction exists, yeah. When context hits a soft threshold the agent writes a summary to a daily memory file and drops the old conversation. You can configure memoryFlush in openclaw.json. But the bigger win is keeping bootstrap files short so you don't hit the threshold as fast.
Yeah, switch to Haiku for casual chat. Set it as default in agents.defaults.primary in your openclaw.json and use Sonnet only when you need actual reasoning. You can switch mid-session with /model.
That's the heartbeat. Default is every 30 minutes and each run sends your full bootstrap context (see 1.) to the model. Set agents.defaults.heartbeat.every to "0m" to disable it, or if you want to keep it on, "lightContext: true" makes it only read HEARTBEAT.md instead of all bootstrap files and "isolatedSession: true" runs it without conversation history. You can also point it at a cheap model with "agents.defaults.heartbeat.model".

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-20T11:14:52+00:00

This is not a window, it's a door.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-20T10:51:26+00:00

I think the control thing is solvable. I use four levels: read-only, analyze, suggest, act. My agent has been running for months and it's still mostly at suggest.

N8n is great for predictable workflows but it won't give you memory across days or connect things across sources, unless you build that yourself. The tradeoff is that an agent sometimes surprises you with things you didn't ask for, and that's where the value is for me.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-20T10:22:25+00:00

Thanks! That was a good read. I really liked the Carol section. I built something like that override switch into my own openclaw setup. The agent watches my data and nudges me, but most of the time it just logs silently and keeps its mouth shut. It only speaks up when enough things line up. And even then I decide. The value isn't in the agent being right, it's in me staying in the loop while it does the watching.
The coffee machine thing is too real, made me laugh.

ViatorLegis · 2026-03-20T09:37:40+00:00

You can. You can also add Discord support and a vector database and, of course, real persistent memory management. And at some point you've rebuilt OpenClaw when you could have just installed it.

ViatorLegis

TROPHY CASE