baileywickham

Thanks for the feedback here, this matches a bunch of patterns we have seen.

One of the fundamental problems is OpenClaw is tech for nerds. It's hard to use, it breaks all the time, it's built on LLMs, etc. We'd like to be the one to bridge the gap but that will take a ton of work. It's something we spend all day thinking about. Some issues like the one you hit with canvas are likely some mix of our problem and the model doing something unexpected like putting the file in the wrong directory which is constantly a problem.

Also agree on the cost being a huge issue. We give $15 up front and it just disappears so quickly for many users. Some users switch to smaller models but often this just ends up with people being more unhappy because the performance is bad. Opus is the least likely to make mistakes but also the most expensive.

Thanks for the advice, it's great to hear you believe in it too! At a personal level, it means a ton to me. Just got to keep writing code.

Go for it!

I think I agree here but for us it's more of a defense in depth thing. If you want to give it access to your email you are opening yourself up to attacks, but it doesn't have that access by default. We have an integration to give the agent it's own inbox instead of requiring access to your gmail for this reason. Similarly, if you want to only use Klaus for coding there is no risk to your personal data, even if your Klaus instance is hacked.

Claude Code is awesome, I use it all day, every day. OpenClaw is similar but not the same. I think if all you do is write code, CC is probably best for you.

OpenClaw is interesting because it does a lot of things ok, but it was the first to do so. It will chat with you in Telegram/messages which is small but surprisingly interesting. It handles scheduled tasks. The open source community is huge, clawhub is very useful for out of the box skills. It's self building and self modifying.

OpenClaw doesn't play well with SDKs like that. It expects to be able to run on a full machine (or container), to execute commands, to write files to disk. If we wanted we could fork and run something like this but we want to stay as close to the OSS as possible.

You're right that security is a major risk. Our perspective here is that by defaulting to an EC2 instance, you're in control of what data is at risk. If you connect Google Workspace, you are exposing yourself to some security risk risk there, but tons of users do email through AgentMail which doesn't have access to your personal data. Also no risk of filesystem access/Apple ID access by default.

It's an Amazon Linux image on an EC2 instance. We install some custom packages too.

We run a dedicated AI SRE for each instance with scoped creds for just their instance. OpenClaw by nature has security risks so we want to limit those as much as possible. We only provision integrations the user has explicitly configured.

We allow you to backup to a private Github repo you own so if you want to version control your setup that way you can. Otherwise most changes are tracked in the chat history and the LLM has some ability to repair itself or validate changes before they are made.