February 24, 2026
Your new roommate is a robot
Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw
HN turns OpenClaw into life hacks: apartment hunts, band setlists, and a cost war brewing
TLDR: An HN thread turns OpenClaw, a text-savvy AI helper, into a household assistant for trips, tasks, and even apartment hunting. Commenters split between wow and wallet: practical fans share wins and friend-flakiness stats, while skeptics demand proof it's worth the API costs—raising big questions about privacy and productivity.
OpenClaw isn’t just a geeky toy anymore—it’s the community’s new robot assistant. The original poster showed off a text-savvy bot that writes security compliance docs, summarizes trip calendars, warns when to cover a bike, picks a morning top 3 to-dos, filters AI news on Hacker News, and snipes hardware deals from Reddit. Cue the comment section turning it into a lifestyle—and a battlefield. Areibman went full house-hunter, having Claw scan Zillow and Craigslist daily and rate listings. Block_dagger brought the tea, analyzing iMessage history to see which friends flake and having the bot suggest band cover songs from chat vibes. Brdd dropped a “it’s set-and-forget” vibe with a write-up. The jokes? People calling it a “robot PA,” memes about the bot texting your spouse back faster than you do, and the “friendship scoreboard” gag got a lot of nervous laughs. But the mood isn’t all high-fives. Protocolture sparked a mini culture war: show me the ROI—is this actually productive compared to your API spend (the money you pay each time the bot uses online services)? UBGBclaw flexed hacker cred, ditching databases so “the filesystem is the brain,” keeping agent memory intact. It’s optimism vs accounting, convenience vs creepiness—and the comments are the show.
Key Points
- •A custom “claw” agent (not OpenClaw) is controlled via a Telegram bot and its own email to automate tasks.
- •For SOC2 vendor evaluations, the agent converted ongoing messages into a final, organized document.
- •It summarizes a trip calendar into shareable text, including availability in Taiwan.
- •Daily functions include priority to-do summaries, AI-focused Hacker News digests with filtered topics, and weather-based bike cover alerts.
- •It monitors subreddits for specific hardware deals (SXM5 servers, Mac Studios >64 GiB RAM) and sends notifications.