Issue 55 - I've Not Used OpenClaw Yet - Will Tech Society Accept Me ?

OpenClaw created history in tech by becoming a full-fledged product from a side project in a matter of a few days. It became so popular that it changed its name three times. It went viral and became:

• The highest starred project on GitHub in a short time, surpassing Linux.

• Peter was invited to all major podcasts, including Lex Fridman

• YouTube was filled with automation use case videos with OpenClaw

• And finally, OpenAI hired Peter.

And yet, I haven’t found a use case for it. Why? These two comics summarise it.

There’s a story I like about a cyclist who spent a lot of time optimizing everything to complete a lap faster. After all that effort spent on optimization, he brought his lap time from 45 minutes to 42 minutes.

He realized that all that effort for just a three-minute save actually does not change anything in his day-to-day life. All that optimization didn’t feel worth it.

Also, I usually follow my rule of three: wait at least 3 months for the hype around a product to settle. Because just so you can automate something doesn’t mean it is worth your time.

Same idea applies here. If a task takes 30 seconds or a minute and you already have a keyboard shortcut for it, than you don’t need to automate it. Below are some examples of what people use OpenClaw for, and how I already have a system in place to do the same task.

• Creating notes: OpenClaw lets you send a WhatsApp message and it creates a note for you. I just use Whisper Flow, dictate directly into Apple Notes on mobile.

• Calendar invites: OpenClaw can take a message and create a calendar event. I do the same with the Raycast natural language extension. Describe the event in plain English and it’s done. I almost never create events from my phone anyway.

• Email summaries: OpenClaw gives you a daily digest of your inbox. I clean my inbox every evening as a habit, so there’s nothing left to summarise.

• Organizing notes: OpenClaw can sort and organize your notes automatically. I do a weekly review on weekends where I go through everything myself. it takes 15 to 30 minutes and I actually know where everything is.

• Slack and Jira: OpenClaw can read threads and draft replies for you. But there are already Slack bots built into both tools that do this. Cursor and Claude agents can also be tagged directly in Slack. More importantly, most threads which I need to reply, require full context, so I need to read the full thread anyway.

• Complex automations: OpenClaw can chain multi-step workflows together. Zapier and n8n already do this.

An Important thing to note here is that, I can do all of this because I’m a developer. I can write a script, prompt Claude to build a small extension, or set up an automation myself. OpenClaw might genuinely be useful for people who aren’t technical. But since I already have the ability to build what I need, I haven’t found a real use case for it yet.

Once I do, I’ll use it and Post it here.

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The following article describes a Flutter use case that is so niche that I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m literally the only person who has it at this point.

With isolate-based concurrency, you don’t need to deal with deadlocks and concurrent modification bugs because your “threads” (isolates) can only communicate by sending each other messages. These messages are always deeply copied, so you can’t accidentally trample on another isolate’s collection, for example. You get your own copy

I have read numerous books and articles about TDD, Clean Architecture, Agile, Extreme Programming, etc. While these concepts are valuable, they may not be universally applicable.

The approach to working in a startup can differ from that in a corporate setting or when building an sdk used by developers. Here, Joel describes five types of software building that require completely different approaches.

To inoculate yourself don’t delegate understanding. If you build your own understanding you will be the one who earns the dividends.

I have used every CI system known to man, and the GitHub Actions log viewer is the only one that has crashed my browser.

I agree the log viewer is terrible in GitHub Actions. In order to find the error message, you have to do at least 5 clicks to locate that message in the logs.

This is the exact flow I have described in one of the blog posts “PLAN.md” which works for me in a similar fashion, saving time and reducing mistakes.

This video basically complements this short blog which I have shared above.

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Flutter implementation of Figma's Auto Layout frames with support for alignment, padding, gap, resizing, and overflow behavior.

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