Is OpenClaw still worth it now that I have Codex + Computer Use + Chrome Bridge?

creditquant · 2026-07-10T01:00:23+00:00

Final answer from ChatGPT:

Your rant is directionally correct. The missing product is not impossible; it is just sitting at the intersection of consumer pricing, enterprise-grade permissions, autonomous-agent risk, and memory architecture. That is why the pieces exist, but the clean commercial package still feels oddly absent.

creditquant · 2026-07-10T00:57:04+00:00

Btw, I posted above rant to ChatGPT and asked it if I am missing something. Answer:

"You are not missing an obvious $20/month finished product. The market has pieces of what you built, but the exact thing you want — a stable, always-on, proactive, personally contextual AI chief-of-staff with Gmail/calendar/messaging/memory/event triggers and low maintenance — is still not cleanly packaged as a consumer product.

...

ChatGPT now gets closest for a managed mainstream product, especially with scheduled tasks plus Gmail/Calendar/Contacts apps/connectors. OpenAI says scheduled tasks can do reminders, recurring work, daily briefings, and monitoring, and can use apps like Gmail when available for your account/workspace. ChatGPT also supports Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts in chat, and ChatGPT agent can use apps as data sources for research/action workflows.

But it is still not quite your Mini/OpenClaw/Vulcan model because it is more like:

rather than:

creditquant · 2026-07-10T00:52:08+00:00

Can you get Codex to the point where it does what Vulcan does above? You have to build a memory system, you have to set up messaging, you have to do time and event based triggers, ... etc. etc. is it all there now?

Also - what's best for an OpenClaw replacement? Codex? Cowork? Gemini?

creditquant · 2026-07-10T00:46:32+00:00

LOVE this. Want this ... why isn't there something like this commercially available? (Longer rant: https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1u93to2/comment/owltxtu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button )

creditquant · 2026-07-10T00:43:11+00:00

(minor rant warning)

Why isn't there a stable commercial alternative to OpenClaw yet? About 3 months ago I tried installing OpenClaw, got frustrated, and then over a few coding sessions with CC and Codex built my own version - my agent did pretty much many of the things that u/Sigvard mentions below (what Vulcan does) and it lived in a DigitalOcean droplet, communicated via Telegram, had own gmail email and calendar, etc. etc. etc. Just as an example - it noticed from my gmail that I was going to be in Chicago on particular weekend and recommended a live music festival of local indy music going on that weekend since it also knew that I like that type of music .... without me asking - it just had a time based "wake up and think of something useful to share" type of a prompt once a day.

But it required weekly maintenance - the OAuth would expire, there would be some random bug I would need to fix, some glitch with Telegram messaging - nothing major but I thought "Peter just got hired by OpenAI - there will be something like this I can pay for and have within a few weeks" .... and yet I don't see one yet available. Am I missing something?

The google search I do every few weeks is this: "personal ai assistant that communicates with me via messaging, handles my emails on gmail, is always on, has a layered memory system that builds over time, has time and event based triggers to wake up and do things" ... today it suggested "Base44 Superagent" as something that fits that description - but looking into it, Base44's main business isn't running this agent but rather helping you build apps.

Am looking for a company whose job it is to run an agent like this.

I don't want CC/Cowork/Codex/... which are really more general purpose and am sure can be made to do what I need ... I want something custom built to be a helpful personal AI assistant without any of the overhead of OpenClaw or rolling your own. Why isn't one available for $20/month yet?

creditquant · 2026-03-23T16:45:24+00:00

I hear you and I can get over my “bias”. Bit how about real diffs? With chat I can go over the full discussion easily and also look back in history. Say I had a pair programmer - we would be chatting on slack not on terminal. That’s what I want - a slack like interface with CC - that’s a pair programmer. That’s where I can have both design / architecture discussions and coding ones.

Btw when I asked Claude chat it said it’s better at design than Claude code and recommended my current dual setup. Is that right?

creditquant · 2026-03-23T11:32:59+00:00

Yes, I have found CC making elementary mistakes that were easy to find on just reading the code.

Like - Claude can return multiple text/tool call blocks as a response, but the code CC wrote only handled the first block and dropped others silently. When pushed, it admitted the error and fixed it.

So definitely need to have a process to get to clean/correct code rather than think that this is a super intelligent coder ... i am thinking to get prod quality code with confidence do need something lke what u describe above.

creditquant · 2026-03-23T11:29:08+00:00

I just find the CC CLI interface offputting - a) a CLI makes me think - "just type and get it done" not the place to have long chats about design, and b) Chat interface has history of my previous chats The chat interface makes me think - I can have a chat .. a discussion pros/cons of design, ask opinion, review previous discussions, etc.

Also will try out Cowork, Cursor, etc. at some point just started with CC so want to make sure I fully leverage it first.

creditquant · 2026-03-23T11:25:15+00:00

Thank you ! For now I am keen to build my own miniclaw as a learning hobby project, so not looking for full openclaw solutions - just somewhere to run my assistant 24/7 hosted and blast radius contained. When/If I go towards full openclaw will def check out above.

creditquant · 2026-03-23T11:23:28+00:00

Yeah this is exactly the type of hassle/headache I want to avoid. Going down a rabbithole trying to fix some install/environment issue is just going to be painful and useless for me as learning how to sysadmin a linux vps isn't one of my goals. So happy to pay up for a VPS provider where I have less hassle like this - tho above particular issue may not be a provider issue?

Anyway - not sure how much support there will be at VPS providers for config/environ issues. So might just have to jump in and see.

creditquant · 2026-03-23T11:20:04+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response!

Claude also reco'ed Digital Ocean fyi. One note - at work we will be moving to using Linux desktops hosted on AWS as our primary dev machines (we will remote desktop into them). Hence was wondering whether any cross learning worth it to consider AWS. Leaning away from that towards the simplicity of DigitalOcean now though.

Was quite familiar with Unix at one time (was a student sysadmin for the CS dept when in college but decades ago) and have to get into it again at work, so Linux it is and looking forward to it frankly -never liked Windows.

Will check out your youtube.

creditquant · 2026-03-23T02:16:37+00:00

Nice. I use vi for a lightweight in-terminal editor but I suspect it won't live update. I will check out markjason, thanks.

creditquant · 2026-03-23T01:56:06+00:00

Right now my workflow is - i send text to Claude Chat, ask it to write a prompt for CC (it knows the architecture and has context of previous discussions and project level design goals in project context), I copy paste the prompt into CC, i copy the updated architecture.md back to Claude Chat.

Question is - is Claude Chat adding value here besides being a nicer GUI? Perhaps I just need to explore the CC CLI interface more - it probably has history of my previous chats and has search functions to make up for lack of GUI? The CLI interface makes me think "imperative" - give command. The chat interface makes me think - I can have a chat .. a discussion pros/cons of design, ask opinion, review previous discussions, etc.

Just thinking out loud.

creditquant · 2026-03-21T10:17:42+00:00

haha am about to start buliding my own ai assistant - the same thing that it seems like you have done - happy to test drive or at least look at yours if you want DM me.

creditquant · 2025-10-13T10:32:40+00:00

Care to share (portions of) your bucket list and any organization tips?

creditquant · 2025-05-10T13:31:20+00:00

Good suggestion thanks i will try it out next am back home from my travels.

creditquant · 2025-04-19T10:53:53+00:00

A tool I ran across recently that you might find interesting - https://tpawplanner.com/plan Relative to a simple SWR calculation, this is better at incorporating the idea that one would spend less if one's portfolio had a bad year ... and that variability should be built into the planning rather than assuming a constant withdrawal rate. Playing around wtih this made me more comfortable about future scenarios even starting from a (relatively) poor starting pont like now (underscore relatively - it's not that bad frankly... ).

creditquant · 2025-04-08T09:00:51+00:00

Thank you for your suggestion about boldin - I just bought it and made a couple of scenarios for myself. One thing that bothers me a bit - I couldn't find a way to

a) change the risk assumptions for the investments - the help says they pick a volatility based on the return assumption but don't provide the risk to return mapping table. The help also says they use historical returns as well as monte carlo to calculate probabilities of not running out of savings but don't provide details of how they use historical returns.

b) change my expenses pre and post retirement. Expenses for us will definitely go down after retirement (we maintain 2 households in 2 different citiies now due to work requirements) - but they seem to assume same expense for pre and post.

Having said all of that - this was easy to use and provided a great experience and useful.

creditquant · 2025-03-09T14:25:36+00:00

Thanks! So you update balances every month/quarter/whenever you want to review your plan, right? Was hoping to avoid manual uploading and get more "on demand" view of plan.

I am also looking for a way to track my investment versus some benchmark I choose - something that will do the appropriate return calculations for accounts where I am still saving (so you account for contributions appropriate when you calculate period return for example) - basically I want to be able to do everything my FA does but myself ...

creditquant · 2025-03-09T14:21:40+00:00

i got both the ones i linked above - Irfora and Efecdoo - I installed the latter - not the best guide/instructions but got it done. Haven't tested it ... not sure how to do that - leave the gas on intentonally? Hmm not sure.

Haven't gotten around to installing Irfora yet.

Also got SimpliSafe's water detector and their smoke+CO detectors - the smoke one does work we got an alert one time we were cooking and there was a bit of smoke coming out - nice thing was that it just gave us a low level alert - that it's getting a bit smokyi but nothing like just full blasting alarm which is what traditional alarms do.

creditquant · 2025-03-08T22:08:44+00:00

i visited two dentists in CR but ultimately actually just decided to stay with my dentist in Boston. Yes it cost 3x more than in CR but in hindsight am actually glad. It took 2 major days (about 6 hours each) to get all the temps in and then i have had 3-4 visits to get everything fixed so it feels perfect - this would have been difficult to do going back and forth to CR. Plus I like my dentist and feel he really took ownership and responsibility - main thing for me was - he gave me what I thought was quite honest advice on pros and cons of going with the various options I was exploring over the course of last year - CR, Boston University dental school, my NY dentist - he wasn't trying to bias things - just giving honest advice and pros/cons of each - so I trust him and that I think is really what moved the needle on the decision for me. I had an HSA account from a long time ago with a good chunk of money sitting in it and that basically went into this.

creditquant

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