I have been on a journey with my clawdbot -> moltbot -> openclaw bot and at this point I have dozens of agents running on multiple bots and multiple servers. If you want to spin up one of your own start here.
I am going to share some of the ways I’m using openclaw to make my life easier and more consistent but I want to be honest: this stuff is addictive. Much like ChatGPT suggest next steps as you’re using it to solve a problem, your LLM-driven-bot will make you aware how many multi-step tasks you do with technology can and should be done by a robot.
I am a huge fan of GTD and productivity todo lists and having managed and built multiple businesses staying organized is a core skill that I am constantly fine-tuning even in my retirement. As easy as all the list solutions are to set up – they are even easier to ignore. The way you adapt any new process is the same white-knuckle “do it for 21 days” until it becomes a habit. Most of the time, you find way sooner that it’s just not going to work for you. This is where openclaw is different: You program it to remind you why you got started, you program it to use the language that gets you back on track when you slip, and it’s right there in your usual chat stream so it’s hard to ignore and easy to get reminded. While I’m the king of ignoring notifications, I always seem to manage to get to all my messages and this works for me
Fitness & Health: Agent Allison
They say adulthood is just a neverending pursuit to lose the same 5-10lb. I still run and I use everything from Apple Fitness to Strava to LoseIt and more often than not I forget about them when I’m not trying to cut before the race. If you follow my Instagram you know I’ve never missed a flavor of Oreos and boy do they have a way of disappearing around my house.
Keeping track of everything is a PITA and tracking calories is a challenge when you’re cooking stuff for kids or throwing out leftovers – undocumented snacks pile up quick. So I built a bot to help me track my exercise and calorie intake. Now before I eat something I just take a picture and bounce it to her:
It keeps track of everything I eat, makes recommendations based on my diet plan, makes adjustments day-to-day and helps me stay on course. I also feed it my Apple Fitness data:
Since February 2nd I’ve automated this process and she has access to it daily and helps me structure the next day. It’s not without bugs but way more consistent than I am.
Logs & Alerts: Agent Watson
There is nothing more panic inducing than a call from your CTO/CIO after midnight.
Ignored and silenced alerts from thousands of different services (still mostly DNS and Amex) can be just as deadly.
I have an agent that is subscribed to all the notifications, alerts, warnings, and beeps in the dark I receive around the clock. In the context of monitoring tools, it is hard to define a creeping issue that will result in a production crash that will take out your entire service/network and it’s even harder to know which alerts should beep at 2AM and which one can wait.
Enter Agent Watson: I now have an LLM with my personality baked in that can triage the issue and figure out which ones I have to address first. Mysql docker crashed for a blog nobody has visited on this side of Covid? Ssssh. Certbot crashing in a loop on a production network and nobody has looked at it in hours? Yeah, let me know!
There is only one Vlad but I keep an eye on multiple Slack channels, multiple ntfy servers, I have 2 cell phones just for “urgent” alerts! LLM and the curated instructions the bot leverages don’t eliminate any of that – but they help facilitate getting important alerts to me quickly while leaving unimportant stuff for the scheduled time when they get my undivided attention.
TV Guide: Agent Joan Rivers
Back in the day it was easy to know what to watch: You either got it from Blockbuster or the network show reminded you of a hit show during every commercial break. With the new era of DVRs and streaming there are millions of options and sometimes I spend more time scrolling through stuff I don’t want to watch. Enter Agent Joan Rivers (remember TV Guide Channel?)
We use Jellyfin for our home entertainment and everyone has their own Jellyseer account to request the shows they want to watch. Every time a show is downloaded it generates an email that nobody reads.
What Joan Rivers does is enumerate my DVR email folder for all the downloads that completed that day. It parses the weird filename into an actual show, season/episode, and pulls similar shows and downloads images and summary from imdb with a youtube link for a trailer. All we get is a single email every day:
It takes unrecognizable filenames in a download report and spits out a tailored TV Guide for the whole family along with recommendations thanks to bots memory, soul, and documented instructions.
Finance: Agent Ron Insana
One of the most frustrating thing in finance is getting to the bottom of why certain stocks are making disproportionate moves. Now that NYSE is trading 24/7 the sun is set on Bloomberg Terminals and the process of discovery is usually digging through random Twitter comments, reading articles behind a paywall, going down the rabit hole of fake rumors and uncited press releases.
Ron Insana was a CNBC host that typically crushed the markets in the final hour of trading by slicing through the fud and nonsense of the IPO era. Now he is my agent that looks at developments across financial news, research newsletters, Twitter chart junkies and my trade groups. My bot looks at my portfolio watchlist and watches my Fintwit feed along with all the popular sites (not directly of course, this thing is so prone to prompt injection that everything is scraped, sanitized, and passed through an n8n workflow).
Bottom line: Every morning and evening I get a report that tells me what’s going on with that stock/security in under 140 characters.
Youtube: Agent Sweet Brown
As a geek I have a ton of Youtube subscriptions for all the random hobbies I’ve picked up in my retirement. They are fantastic but I understand everyone has to make a buck so sometimes a 30 second video is 20 minutes long. And do I really care about a new RG Abernic handheld? Say it with me:
Every evening my Sweet Brown agent enumerates my Youtube subscriptions and looks at all the new episodes published that day. It pulls the transcripts for the episode and runs it through the LLM. I get a TV Guide email that includes the link to the episode and a 140 character summary of what they covered.
It also has instructions on what I really want to see! This is where it’s magical. If the episode has transcripts (some don’t) and it meets the criteria of what I want to watch – it adds it to my playlist. This way I have a Vlad channel that is curated by my Agent Sweet Brown and I don’t open Youtube and go scrolling, I go straight to my playlist and let it rip.
Agent Prince Adewale
If you thought I was an asshole before, wait till you read this 🙂
I have spent most of my adult life killing SPAM for a living. Hand on the bible – “unsubscribe” processes don’t do shit. Yeah, they might unsubscribe you from one or two reputable companies but the new era of Zoomer businesses changes marketing tools more often than they change their underwear and I’m getting marketing emails from several “employees” of the soap company. The moment I unsubscribe from one of them there is a notification from another. Took a car to a dealership? You’re getting an email from the service department, from the sales department looking for a tradein, suddenly you’re learning about their awards and holiday specials. There is no unsubscribing from this shit. It’s endless because companies don’t care about unsubscription requests and they move their mailing lists a lot.
You know who cares? The designated ARIN IP block owner. OH THEY CARE ABOUT A DIRTY IPv4 BLOCK A LOT. Send an abuse complaint to that address and cc: an RBL and half a dozen nerds start sending nasty emails.
Enter Prince Adewale, son of a former Nigerian minister… but my dear friend finally got his money out of his war-torn country and now he works for your boy Vlad filing abuse reports on your fly-by-night dropship-from-Temu Instagram millionaire. Second email today about a new soap scent your company dropped? I’m not unsubscribing, I’m dragging your email to Adewale’s folder.
How it works: I have a background job that copies messages from Adewale to my agents mailbox daily. When I get bored I open a Chrome tab and send a message to Prince Adewale on Telegram to get started abusing the abusers. First, the bot downloads the message, explodes the SMTP headers and looks up the netblock owner. Then it scopes out abuse and postmaster contacts and drafts an official abuse email to send on behalf of ExchangeDefender. At the same time, a second supervised process opens up the unsubscribe link from the email, automatically fills out the form, captcha and navigates through the emotional messages marketers think make a damn bit of difference – screenshot of the unsubscribe gets attached to the ARIN abuse form and packed away.
My inbox hasn’t been this clean since the 90s.
Time Suck
Once you realize just how many of your pursuits have failed because you lacked adequate accountability or you let process friction hold you back from realizing your goals… you will waste an indefinite amount of time tweaking your bots. Personally, this way is more fun 🙂
It’s by no means magic – processes break, cron jobs don’t run on time, sites time out and I try to put an n8n & scraper in between everything these bots get fed to them. All in all, I spend way, way, way, way, way less time managing my workflow than I did wasting time on just one of the tasks these bots do.