Funny you should say that
In the previous thread, Bob Mulroy said:
I keep wanting to subscribe to Grok, but it seems to be for entertainment only. It won’t pay bills, analyze investments, monitor my garden robot, or anything substantial.
I think it’ll read books for you and provide a teenager’s insight though.
Grok can’t, but OpenClaw can. The question is – do you really want it to?
I got in a conversation with someone I know the other day who is running an OpenClaw instance. It interested me enough that I’ve spent the afternoon asking Grok to explain how it works.
OpenClaw is a free program. It will run under Windows, Mac or Linux – but it’s by far better on Linux. Generally, you give it its own dedicated computer, phone chip, Gmail account and so on.
Then you give it tasks. Like, create a briefing first thing in the morning – say, all the stuff on your calendar, any meetings or appointments, the news headlines. You can ask it to scan for any new papers on your speciality and report back with a summary. It can find interesting items and write first drafts of blog posts (I swear I’m not doing this). It can separate the spam from the real emails.
Apparently, it really shines for large coding processes with multiple modules. Unlike a Grok or Claude that solves a particular problem and hands it back to you, OpenClaw monitors all the moving parts and remembers where you’ve been.
It learns from you and stores your preferences. It will take any tone you like. For the less technical user, you can communicate with it via WhatsApp(!) or any other messaging service.
It has what is described as a ‘heartbeat’ – a regular schedule on which it wakes up, does a job, passes the results to you and goes back to sleep. This article explains some of the things people use it for.
For a lot of things, it needs the help of another LLM – like Claude or GPT. For that, you pay. How much it costs depends on how much it needs. My acquaintance said when he ran it under Windows, it was costing £10 a day on tokens just to run its self-repair program. I think we’ve finally discovered how that AI companies plan to make their money back!
So unless you want it to buy movie tickets or make restaurant reservations for you, you’re better off sticking to lightweight Q&A with the free services. I sure would like to play with an instance for a while, though.
April 29, 2026 — 6:11 pm
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