https://agent-flywheel.com/

Are there other tasks that people commonly want to run, that don't require this, that I'm not aware of? If so I'd love to hear about them.

The ClawBert thing makes a lot more sense to me, but implementing this with just a Claude Code instance again seems like a really easy way to get pwned. Without a human in the loop and heavy sandboxing, a agent can just get prompt injected by some user-controlled log or database entry and leak your entire database and whatever else it has access to.

So there isn't really a way to avoid this trade-off you can either have a useless agent with no info and no access. Or a useful agent that then is incredibly risky to use as it might go rogue any moment.

Sure you can slightly choose where on the scale you want to be but any usefulness inherently means it's also risky if you run LLMs async without supervision. The only absolutely safe way to give access and info to an agent is with manual approvals for anything it does. Which gives you review fatigue in minutes.

Two questions as a potential user who knows the gist of OpenClaw but has been afraid to try it: 1. I don't understand how the two consumption credits play into the total cost of ownership. E.g. how long will $20 of Orthogonal credits last me? I have no idea what it will actually cost to use Klaus/OpenClaw for a month. 2. Batteries included sounds great, but what are those batteries? I've never heard of Apollo or Hunter.io so I don't know the value of them being included.

In general, a lot of your copy sounds like it's written for people already deep into OpenClaw. Since you're not targeting those folks, I would steer more towards e.g. articulating use cases that work ootb and a TCO estimate for less technical folks. Good luck, and I'm eager to try it!

I can give you an openclaw instruction that will burn over $20k worth of credits in a matter of hours.

You could also not talk to your claw at all for the entire month, setup no crons / reoccurring activities / webhooks / etc, and get a bill of under $1 for token usage.

My usage of OpenClaw ends up costing on the order of $200/mo in tokens with the claude code max plan (which you're technically not allowed to use with OpenClaw anymore), or over $2000 if I were using API credits I think (which Klause is I believe, based on their FAQ mentioning OpenRouter).

So yeah, what I consider fairly light and normal usage of OpenClaw can quite easily hit $2000/mo, but it's also very possible to hit only $5/mo.

Most of my tokens are eaten up by having it write small pieces of code, and doing a good amount of web browser orchestration. I've had 2 sentence prompts that result in it spinning up subagents to browse and summarize thousands of webpages, which really eats a lot of tokens.

I've also given my OpenClaw access to its own AWS account, and it's capable of spinning up lambdas, ec2 instances, writing to s3, etc, and so it also right now has an AWS bill of around $100/mo (which I only expect to go up).

I haven't given it access to my credit card directly yet, so it hasn't managed to buy gift cards for any of the friendly nigerian princes that email it to chat, but I assume that's only a matter of time.

Giving an agent access to AWS is effectively giving it your credit card.

At the max, I would give it ssh access to a Hetzner VM with its own user, capable of running rootles podman containers.

This is a problem for coding as smarter really has an impact there, but there are so so so many tasks that an 8b model that runs on a $200 gpu can handle nicely. Scrape this page and dump json? Yeah that’s gonna be fine.

This is my conclusion based on a week or so of using ollama + qwen3.5:3b self hosted on a ~10 year old dell optiplex with only the built-in gpu. You don’t need state of the art to do simple tasks.

Orthogonal credits are used more frequently by power users. For everyday tasks they'll last a very long time, I don't think any of our users have run out.

Some example Orthogonal user cases:

* customers in sales uses Apollo to get contact info for leads

* I use Exa search to help me prepare for calls by getting background info on customers and businesses

* I used SearchAPI to help find AirBnbs.

Point taken on the copy! We made this writing more technical for the HackerNews audience and try to use less jargon on other platforms.

IMO I don't think the "OpenClaw has root access to your machine" angle is the thing you should worry that much about. You can put your OpenClaw on a VM, behind a firewall and three VPNs but if it's got your Google, AWS, GitHub, etc. credentials you've still got a lot to worry about. And honestly, I think malicious actors are much more interested in those credentials than wiping out your machine.

I'm honestly kind of surprised everyone neglects to think about that aspect and is instead more concerned with "what if it can delete my files."

Basically how do you make sure your "AI SRE" does not deviate from it's task and cause mayhem in the VM, or worse. Exfiltrates secrets, or other nasty things? :)

There seem to be about 20 options, and new ones every day. Any consensus on the best few are, and their tradeoffs?

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327474

OpenClaw is capable of using ElevenLabs or other providers to make phone calls, but I personally haven't done this and as far as I know none of our customers have either. Is AI good enough at cold calling yet for this to work? I personally would never entertain such a call.

oh fuck yea, sounds great.

Hard pass on this (and OpenClaw) thanks.