The original plan was to talk about how to use Open Claw.
But as I actually set it up and used it myself, I increasingly wondered whether this topic really fit our group. The core members of this meetup studied together in our MBA program, and most of them come from non-engineering backgrounds. It struck me that typing commands into a terminal and actually configuring and using the tool wouldn’t be easy for them.
On top of that, using it myself raised several thoughts of my own.
The first and biggest one was, “what would I actually use this for?”
After setting it up, saving various configurations as md files via Telegram, and playing around at building my own ‘Jarvis,’ I started to feel that using it without a clear purpose might not amount to much. It’s a powerful tool, but just as hard to use, and without a clear objective, the value felt low relative to the effort.
The second was the billing issue.
As I tried using it for various things, I sometimes hit token limits and couldn’t continue, which led me to switch to a paid plan to work around it. But using it without any preprocessing meant token consumption ballooned, and I ended up with unexpected costs.
The third was a security concern.
Updates have kept coming since I installed it, and looking at the release notes, most of them were vulnerability fixes rather than user-convenience improvements. Even though it’s open source, I felt its reliability hasn’t yet been sufficiently established, and I felt somewhat uneasy about granting it access to personal information, control over my PC, and various APIs.
For these reasons, I introduced Claude Cowork instead of Open Claw at this meetup. I shared how ordinary users could put an agent to use, and the feedback I got was that even this level is meaningful enough for work automation and business use.
Of course, Claude Cowork is a plenty powerful and appealing solution in its own right. Still, Open Claw’s power and appeal are real too. Its founder was scouted by OpenAI, and word is that major AI players are also developing similar gateway-style solutions of their own, tailored to their own business assets and purposes.
Going forward, I expect these tools to develop in the direction of stronger security and higher reliability, and to appear on the market in an even wider variety of forms as they combine with each company’s own assets. It’s also striking that in China in particular, Open Claw’s potential is already rated highly, and use cases are spreading rapidly.
I suspect that a solution more stable and powerful than Open Claw — or one optimized for a specific purpose — will emerge before long.
And when that happens, I imagine I’ll once again find myself pulled into the world of subscriptions and billing, driven by the same curiosity of “what is this thing?”
Even so, experiencing and sharing something new still feels like a genuinely enjoyable process! :)
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