Sometimes you can just tell something's off. No exclamation mark, double dash instead of an emdash. Human-slop on my HN? This place is becoming more and more like Reddit, I swear!
Yeah, i’ve gone to the point where I will just stop reading AI posts after a paragraph or two if there are no specifics. The “it works!” / “no it doesn’t” genre is saturated with generality. Show, don’t tell, or I will default to believing you don’t have anything to show at all.
That was very vague, but I kinda get where they're coming from.
I'm now using pi (the thing openclaw is built on) and within a few days i build a tmux plugin and semaphore plugin^1, and it has automated the way _I_ used to use Claude.
The things I disagree with OP is: The usefulness of persistent memory beyond a single line in AGENTS.md "If the user says 'next time' update your AGENTS.md", the use of long-running loops, or the idea that everything can be resolved via chat - might be true for simple projects, but any original work needs me to design the 'right' approach ~5% of the time.
That's not a lot, but AI lets you create load-bearing tech-debt within hours, at which point you're stuck with a lot of shit and you dont know how far it got smeared.
They're not coming from anywhere. It's an LLM-written article, and given how non-specific it is, I imagine the prompt wasn't much more than "write an article about how OpenClaw is changing my life".
And the fact this post has 300+ comments, just like countless LLM-generated articles we get here pretty much daily... I guess proves the point in a way?
That’s another reason there just isn't any point in looking at these articles anymore unless they take you on a trip deep in the weeds of some specific problem or example. We need deep case studies (pro and con), not bulleted lists and talking points.
My agents get auto-injected with the core spec via pi-extention.
I have an idea, agent turns it into a draft, depending on idea vagueness/complexity combination of: Looking for alternative, plan the change, look for alternative, split up into smaller drafts to drive separately, execute change (spec, code, tests), review change.
Usually its just: Draft, plan, exec, commit. The steps are flexible enough. Usually each step is a different agent, sometimes not. On complex builds or big changes, a planning agent itself might spawn subagents to avoid bloating its own context.
The progress is stored in: ./dev/{draft/<n>.md , wip/<n>/, fin/<n>/ }.
My `lead` pi has a separate AGENTS.md with how to organize the above sequence, and some notes on how to prompt, keep things small, etc. Note that its skill `tmux-coding-agrents` calls other pi instances (optionally set to codex). I've moved off the claude cli entirely.
I used to spend time telling claude not to forget updating the specs or building its tests because context bloat made them forget AGENTS.md, or to read certain files before it should execute a plan. The lead agent does this just fine now, and every time i see it make a mistake i say: "Next time do X" and it automatically updates its own or the worker agents AGENTS.md.
Because my lead agent context is all about managing this process it doesn't forget steps while its off chasing some bug.
Also, I build (but did not publish) a pi plugin that attempts to use other accounts on usage limits.
Most surprising moment I had, was my lead spawning a subagent, spawning a subagent, which spawned a tmux-bash build with very little prompting, and it was the right thing to do to prevent each agent from context bloat.
Thanks for the write up. I'm starting to consider enhancing my setup and building on pi sounds interesting. I have a similar core workflow, but I'm still tied to CC's interface and I can see how it might be nice to have something a bit more custom.
- the smaller context and default-off for thinking make it extremely fast (thinking is a dead-end bitter lesson imo)
- the source is available; and organized specifically to make it easy for agents to write and test extensions. Just launch pi in the pi-mono directory, and it will turn your idea into an extension in no time.
There is no code, there are no tools, there is no configuration, and there are no projects.
This is an AI generated post likely created by going to chatgpt.com and typing in "write a blogpost hyping up [thing] as the next technological revolution", like most tech blog content seems to be now. None of those things ever existed, the AI made them up to fulfill the request.
> There is no code, there are no tools, there is no configuration, and there are no projects.
To add to this, OpenClaw is incapable of doing anything meaningful. The context management is horrible, the bot constantly forgets basic instructions, and often misconfigures itself to the point of crashing.
There is zero evidence this is the case. You are making up baseless accusation, probably due to partisan motivations.
edit: love the downvotes. I guess HN really is Reddit now. You can make any accusation without evidence and people are supposed to just believe it. If you call it out you get downvoted.
It doesn’t work like that. The burden is on the person making the claim. If you are going to accuse someone of posting an AI-written article you need you show evidence.
It's a losing strategy in 2026 to assume by default that any questionable spam blog/comment/etc content is written by an actual human unless proven otherwise.
Besides, if there are enough red flags that make it indistinguishable from actual AI slop, then chances are it's not worth reading anyway and nothing of value was lost by a false positive.
What evidence are you expecting exactly? It's vacuous AI slop that spends 1000 words just making vague assertions about how incredible OpenClaw is without a single actual example. There's nothing here, it's not real. You are going to struggle going forward if you can't detect AI slop this obvious.
Exactly. Posts that say "I got great results" are just advertisements. Tell me what you're doing that's working good for you. What is your workflow, tooling, what kind of projects have you made.
>Over the past year, I’ve been actively using Claude Code for development. Many people believed AI could already assist with programming—seemingly replacing programmers—but I never felt it brought any revolutionary change to the way I work.
Funny, because just last month, HN was drowning in blog posts saying Claude Code is what enables them to step away from the desk, is definitely going to replace programmers, and lets people code "all through chatting on [their] phone" (being able to code from your phone while sitting on the bus seems to be the magic threshold that makes all the datacenters worth it).
Yeah… I'm using Claude Code almost all day every day, but it still 100% requires my judgment. If another AI like OpenClaw was just giving the thumbs up to whatever CC was doing, it would not end well (for my projects anyway).
Yes. Programmers might be especially susceptible precisely because our advanced understanding makes us think we cannot be easily fooled.
But we are also easier to impress: only we understand how difficult it is to one-shot code a working app.
AI psychosis sets in when AI captures enough of your perception to alter your reality. Programmers might be "smarter", but we give AI a bigger set of tools to capture our perception with.
And then there's the fact that we want to be fooled.
We are also used to prioritizing "flow states" as part of our engagement with technology, and these tools seem to be flow-state inducers. Also prone to following hype, used to typing words into computers to get results, etc...
"Flow-state inducers" is interesting, and I think you're onto something. There's something so satisfying about getting working code so easily, feeling like you're jumping from one solution to the next.
Did they even end up launching and maintaining the project? Did things break and were they able to fix it properly? The amount of front-loaded fondness for this technology without any of the practical execution and follow up really bugs me.
It's like we all fell under the spell of a terminal endlessly printing output as some kind of measurement of progress.
It makes me sad that there are so many of these heavily-upvoted posts now that are hand-wavey about AI and is itself AI-generated. It benefits everyone involved except people like me who are trying to cut through the noise.
He goes on about putting a mass driver on the moon for ultra-low-cost space launches.
His plan here clearly hinges around using robots to create a fully-automated GPU manufacturing and launch facility on the moon. Not launching any meaningful number from earth.
Raises some big questions about whether there are actually sufficient materials for GPU manufacture on the moon... But, whatever the case, the current pitch of earth-launches that the people involved with this "space datacenter" thing are making is a lie. I think it just sounds better than outright saying "we're going to build a self-replicating robot factory on the moon", and we are in the age of lying.
If any single country tried to create a whole production chain to single-handedly manufacture modern computer equipment it would be on the order of decades to see any result. Doing it on the moon is just not realistic this century, maybe the next one. Although i don't think the economics would ever work out.
I love Cachy, but please don't recommend it as a reasonable first step into Linux.
It's a lot more polished than Arch, but it's not for someone who hasn't used Linux before and wants a reliably rock solid and predictable experience 365 days a year, with no fiddling.
It's rolling release, and there are inevitably bugs when updating immediately to every minor version of every part of the OS stack. Arch/Cachy/Endeavour are for experts, and those who enjoy tinkering. (If you want to recommend something Arch-flavored, just recommend Manjaro, and don't listen to the memers who parrot some youtuber's list of ancient and silly engagement-bait grievances.)
Yeah, the body-wide mucous thinning properties of NAC are one of the reasons it has racked up papers showing its efficacy in a truly staggering number of illnesses and conditions. (Including neurodegenerative diseases.)
Highly recommend reading the actual literature on its effects in regard to cystic fibrosis, pancreatitis, COPD, neurodegenerative disorders, high blood pressure, ulcers, IBD, liver and kidney problems, OCD...
The list goes on at a pretty extreme length, and it sounds too good to be true, but the papers are out there.
NAC is in the category of supplements that sound unbelievably amazing on paper, but are frequently discontinued by people trying to take it long term. Some people seem to like it, but it’s common for people to take it for a while and realize it’s causing side effects like anhedonia, apathy, minor sleep disruptions, or other subtle negative effects. Not everyone, but it’s a common outcome.
It also doesn’t quite live up to a lot of the incredible sounding papers for many conditions. It’s really common to find papers or even small trials purporting to find amazing effects from supplements that fail to replicate at scale. NAC does have some legitimate applications and is even used medically for certain conditions. I’m a little more skeptical that all of the amazing positives for every condition under the sun will hold up.
When considering NAC's mechanisms, it seems that it's efficacy is likely dependent on an individuals's glutathione status.
I doubt that folks with a solid diet, high in sulfur would find much benefit from NAC.
However, as someone who's gotten to use it first hand and have dealt with lifelong, mild inflammation (puffy fingers, clogged nose here and there), it's definitely been a huge quality of life enhancer.
> When considering NAC's mechanisms, it seems that it's efficacy is likely dependent on an individuals's glutathione status.
NAC interacts with a lot of things. Not just glutathione.
It modulates glutamate activity in the brain. That’s a key neurotransmitter. It’s why it can be helpful in some specific psychiatric conditions, but also why many people discovering it to be cognitively dulling or to induce blunt effect.
It also interacts with trace minerals in your body. Taking it for a long time can reduce these levels, creating multiple secondary problems.
The list of things it does goes on and on. It’s not a simple supplement for glutathione.
Would also like to ask for a starting point in this. Googling has not really gotten me anywhere credible. Specifically related to stroke or high blood pressure (both family traits).
TLDR: NAC is a derivative of an amino acid called cysteine, as such it is a precursor for one of the most important antioxidants in the body and it can modulate key metabolic pathways associated with good health across a variety of organs, notably for decades it has been a universally successful antidote for acetaminophen (Tylenol) overdose, it’s available over the counter but NAC is not naturally found in foods, eating cysteine-rich foods like chicken turkey yogurt etc is the next best bet.
> By contrast, post-treatment with NAC aggravated ethanol-induced hepatic lipid peroxidation and worsened acute ethanol-induced liver damage in a dose-dependent manner.
The article is about improving the flow of lymph in the brain, and NAC thins mucous, lymph, and various other bodily fluids, which leads to improved flow and general clearance.
It sounds like a hero story – it's not, it's more an existential nightmare and funny story? – but I kind of accidentally came to start reading all kinds of papers. Then fiancée was diagnosed with a severe condition. And just by having read stuff I found myself needing to interject doctors during her treatment, quite pointedly, to avoid risk of harm to her and unborn child – with my view being confirmed every single time by another doctor's second opinion.
It's mostly about reading fast enough, not actually requiring a feeling of comprehension. Skimming and going fast through lots of stuff. With extreme humility!! And then bit by bit an intuition kind of grows and you cut through the jargon and get a feeling for the core things. The mights and maybes and relationships in things. And then sort of learning to trust and not trust that intuition and have it guide your reading. It mostly shows up as doubt – an active doubt? – rather than an opaque sense of not having any feeling for things. Then that sometimes refines away from doubt into a sense of clarity towards some mechanism that's probably at play. Keeping absolutely humble towards it is suuuuuuper important, and it's always necessary to retain the perspective of oneself as limited and fallible.
It's also very hard to get this stuff into words. Seems more nebulous and "cosmic" than it is. It's just how our minds and reading comprehension work. It's about feeding the pattern detection systems with... substrate? A handle on things?
There are a few reasons why it works. "Works" as in is beneficial and useful to read, beyond just trusting doctors. (Do trust doctors!, –Jusr... help them help you. That's the thing.) One reason is that doctors do not have time to read, even if they'd very much want to. This is sort of force-multiplied?... with the personalization aspect: It is immensely valuable to read molecular biology from the personal perspective of operating and being inside a specific instance of that molecular biology machinery. The doctor's view is always more general (and is always a guardrail of safety, in part because of that). Then another reason is that there is SO MUCH actionable science out there. Just eminently safe and very, very actionable. It's so hard to get it across how it might be so, how it could possibly be, but it is. It really is.
Good question; It's also hard to get this into words.
Basically I'm fine but I shouldn't be, people are fine who wouldn't have been, lost one unborn child and the next one not; Got a pretty good handle on some significant sleep issues, pulmonary issues, one of the real autoimmune diseases, autonomic nervous system issues, recovery from a life-threatening endocrine issue, pregnancy and placental viability with same issue. All completely opaque to healthcare, all surprisingly mechanistic and actionable by just... reading. Very unbelievable but this is just how it's been.
It's not about me being special or a hero or anything. The gap between really truly actionable knowledge and medical practice is so big and generally so unseen that it's hard to talk across it. Classically maddening. So easy to get there though, by just... reading.
OK, I just read the abstract and conclusion of the NAC paper posted above. But then I saw a comment from Aurornis saying it’s not that good. Not sure who I should listen to.
Which ones? This one in particular is special? See the problem? I still need to trust some authority on which ones to spend time on.
I think the parent was implying that we should try to avoid bias by reading it ourselves, but I still need to trust someone, so still getting biased feedback. "reading the paper" does not remove the bias, because I still need to narrow it down to read only specific ones.
None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
I think the platforms have changed. FB used to be 100% posts by people you know. I opened it today, and maybe 1 out of 50 posts were by someone i know, the rest was "trending" content.
Its essentially an entirely different website now.
For what it is worth, here is my experience with Facebook, [a platform that I have learnt to love after my Twitter ban]: I go to the main page, I immediately click the magnifying lens, so I get the list of unread posts of the 10to20 groups I follow. I read them quickly. Then leave.
I do that, on a daily basis.
Time spent: usually 20 minutes.
Reddit is 99% search only. I go there only on a purpose. [might be replaced by Gemini, eventually]
HN and Alterslash are probably the only source of random info that I still consume.
May be that information containment is a reaction to my 15+ years of addiction to [the good old] Twitter. Or because I have reached age 50.
But the consequence is that I get the news late, and usually because of a search I did. Not because of a proactive algorithm.
Additional thought: in the end I suppose my information un-déluge is the proof that algorithms eventually failed to deliver [i.e point me at things meaningful to me]. The biggest example is Spotify proposals. That is 1% of my music discovery, whereas traditional non-commercial radios and dedicated podcasts are [human curated and] much more diverse.
Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.
If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.
They don't, at least not necessarily. I look at my HN history and it's 13 hours ago, 6 days ago, 8 days ago, 13 days ago. Fifteen years ago I was #2 on the leaderboard (itself now gone, it listed users by total comment karma) and would post about 4-5 times a day. Now when I'm not posting, I'm actually not on the site and not reading replies. I just don't have time.
I think a decent-sized subset of Millennials have basically aged out of the time-surplus years of the early 20s and are now busy with kids and careers and families. And they aren't being replaced by the new 20-somethings, at least not on social media of the same form. The kids are still on text messages and Whatsapp and Discord and Roblox and Google Docs (!!), but they aren't interested in getting on the public Internet, and if they are, their parents won't let them.
Not to mention the many tales from Anthropic's development team, OpenClaw madness, and the many studies into this matter.
AI is a force of nature.
(Also, this article reeks of AI writing. Extremely generic and vague, and the "Skynet" thing is practically a non-sequitur.)
reply