- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?
- Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings.
- Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?
- Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar?
- If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload? Maybe you can get clawdbot to remind you to check your reminders. Better yet, summarize them.
> Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?
I agree that removing items and taking pictures takes more effort than it saves, but I would use a simpler solution if one existed because it turns out I cannot remember what we have. When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the fridge or pantry in the basement.
> Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar?
In the morning I typically check my work calendar, my personal calendar, the shared family calendar, and the kids' various school calendars. It would be convenient to have these aggregated. (Copying events or sending new events to all of the calendars works well until I forget and one slips through the cracks...)
> If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload?
Yes, this is the problem I have. This doesn't look like a suitable solution for me, but I understand the need.
> In the morning I typically check my work calendar, my personal calendar, the shared family calendar, and the kids' various school calendars. It would be convenient to have these aggregated. (Copying events or sending new events to all of the calendars works well until I forget and one slips through the cracks...)
But... calendar apps already let you aggregate your calendars into a single view. Even if you have them on separate accounts (or some other impediment), you can easily share a read-only version of, say, your work calendar with your personal account so that you can have them combined in the morning.
> you can easily share a read-only version of, say, your work calendar with your personal account so that you can have them combined in the morning.
If only it was that easy! I'm not allowed to share content to or from my work calendar for security reasons. The school and camp calendars are a mix of PDFs and hand-written websites -- a neighbor wrote a scraper to extract the information from a few of them into a caldav at one point but it ended up being even flakier than copying the relevant bits by hand. There's no technical barrier to consolidating my personal calendar with the various family / neighborhood calendars but in practice I have to hide most of the other calendars because the volume of irrelevant events is just too large, so I end up just copying over the relevant events to a personal calendar.
I think this problem is one that AI could actually help with- simply snap a photo of my school calendar and ask the ai to add the important items to my personal calendar.
But I don't need the AI to do this everyday, just when i get a new calendar.
It honestly tempting to point a camera at my workstation so AI can "watch over my shoulder" while I'm working on systems that are pointlessly excessively locked down.
I don't do, but it is tempting, and I bet people will do it.
Too much security makes people seek insecure workarounds...
Or to quote Star Wars, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers”.
Many years ago I watched someone marched out of the room in handcuffs by military police for plugging a USB thumb drive in the wrong computer.
My current situation isn't anywhere near that strict, and I agree that many security postures are dumb and overbearing, like unnecessarily frequent password rotation. But honestly, preventing employees from sharing company documents with random third parties doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
I agree, but a lot of companies risk exactly that by creating policies that people are likely to have reasons to want to bypass.
E.g. Calendar sharing. It's a paintpoint if you often have irregular working hours and have to match up a personal and work calendar. At least allow sharing busy/not busy... By not doing so, you create an environment where people are tempted to find workarounds that might be much worse.
Part of your security posture needs to be to consider how to prevent friction in areas where reducing it removes incentives for non-compliance.
We have forgotten the simple, reliable solutions of the past - a grocery list on the fridge, a weekly planner, a weekly plan itself rather than constant coordination. Cell phones and easy communication led us here.
I'm curious what makes you think the solutions of the past have been forgotten or that they were somehow more reliable? (They're certainly simpler, I'll give you that!)
I have printouts of school/camp calendars taped to the wall, a weekly planner on the kitchen whiteboard, paper grocery lists on the fridge, and a pocket notebook for capturing random tasks. I used to believe that some lifehack, process, methodology, app, or modern jeejah would finally solve my organization problems. But as I got older I made peace with the fact that they're all limited by the same weak link -- me.
Ignoring the fact that OP does not know about existing solutions like Grocy where people do find value in the currently tedious setup of adding products and tracking their kitchens inventory, and just zeroing in on your first point. The paper grocery list is terrible
If you cook at all a solution like Mealie becomes your cookbook. Its trivial to create grocery list for when you take the time to plan out your meals for the day, week, or month. If you are not shopping by yourself, everyone on the app can just pick up things in the grocery store independently. Its an actual time saver
Mealie exposes an API so you could theoretically expose it to another solution like Home Assistant and have your grocery list sync with your errands list. Suddenly you have the ability so that anyone using Home Assistant could get an alert when they are nearby the grocery store or Costco to pick up things on this combined list. Maybe your partner is walking by a store you've created a zone for, with items on your master list, gets an alert, and they can mark off some things that they picked up and it syncs back to where the items were originally added. Your inventory is then updated based on marked off items.
Now imagine if you did not have to come up with the bespoke master list for all the stores you go to and it can determine when to send that alert. You can also just snap a picture of your receipt or shopping cart and it is all figured out for you.
But you could just use piece of paper with the magnet on the fridge.
Theres a lot of manual process that can be eliminated for things people already find convenient enough to do manually. Local models can easily handle much of this already.
> In the morning I typically check my work calendar, my personal calendar, the shared family calendar, and the kids' various school calendars. It would be convenient to have these aggregated. (Copying events or sending new events to all of the calendars works well until I forget and one slips through the cracks...)
Why in the world would you use a non-deterministic system for something so banal but important?
LLMs regularly let things slip through the cracks in ways no human would ever do so.
> When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the fridge or pantry in the basement.
We used to have a similar problem until we made a policy that if you use something up you add it to our shared shopping list, usually with a voice command to Siri. Whenever someone is at the store we just check the list, making sure we mark off things that are purchased.
Officially we have a similar policy except that it's a paper list next to the pantry. But with a half-dozen people in our household the likelihood that everyone has been 100% reliable in adding finished items to the list and there are no omissions is low, hence the text messages.
Fridge cataloging is actually a great use case for image recognition, the problem is fridges no accommodations to power accessories inside them.
I have a couple of temperature sensors to alert Home Assistant if the fridge gets too warm. It would be easy and cheap to add some ESP32-camera modules to track contents...but there's no way to power them nicely (I simply don't know where I could pull USB power through).
Samsung makes an "AI Vision" fridge I looked at briefly, but it didn't come close to making sense for us given the unreliability of the vision system, the cost of replacing a couple fridges, and the comparative simplicity of a paper list.
You can only track what containers are in the fridge, not how much is left or if it’s expired. “Automated” pantry or fridge tracking is just not possible and requires way more effort than just writing “mustard” on the shopping list when you notice you’re low.
If you had a scale with an image recognition camera and you put everything on the scale before and after removing it from the fridge, it would probably work pretty well? I've been pondering setting something like that up, it would also be really helpful for keeping track of how much and of what I'm actually putting into the food I made, if I weigh everything before and after, I can just collect the amounts after the fact and don't have to worry as much about measuring if I want to make the same dish again.
Again, you still have to put in way more work. You have to somehow know the weight of the container, otherwise it will never register as empty. Or you have to know the volume and the density of its contents (or worse, think about a jar of olives or pickles, how would a weight tell you it’s empty with the brine in there?). You still don’t know the expiry date. There’s no chance of automatically tracking this stuff.
The weight and expiry of the contents is printed on the package. Brine is a problem but olives and pickles it's much more tractable to estimate from a picture. These are all essentially solved image recognition problems. It doesn't need to be perfect to be useful either. The expiration date is the trickiest one, but mostly because you would need cameras on all sides including top and bottom, so you might end up having to hold it up for a moment to make sure the bottom is clearly photographed.
And yes, it's a bit more work but it gives high-fidelity data, with the right software you could calculate your actual nutrient intake with very high fidelity, which would actually be worth an extra 15-30 minutes a day of effort.
That is most of the "productivity" bubble, with AI or not. You are trying to fit everything into tightly defined processes, categories and methodologies to not have to actually sit down and do the work.
- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?
Had to go back because I skimmed over this screenshot. I have to presume it's because this guy who books $600 Airbnb's for vacation wants to save a couple bucks by ordering them on Amazon.
It doesn't cost $600 in Anthropic credits though. It probably costs a few cents (definitely <$1).
I do understand the general point you're trying to make, but you can't overestimate the cost of tokens by a few orders of magnitude and still expect the logic to hold.
>Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?
Am I missing this in the article? Do you mean the shoes he's holding? He explains it immediately.
>when i visited REI this weekend to find running shoes for my partner, i took a picture of the shoe and sent it to clawdbot to remind myself to buy them later in a different color not available in store. the todo item clawdbot created was exceptionally detailed—pulling out the brand, model, and size—and even adding the product listing URL it found on the REI website.
Yes you are missing the picture where Brandon asks Linguini to add a reminder to buy a pair of Arc'Teryx gloves, which Brandon is holding in his hands.
The image and the text don't match. The image is talking about gloves, but in the narrative he says "when i visited REI this weekend to find running shoes for my partner, i took a picture of the shoe and sent it to clawdbot to remind myself to buy them later in a different color not available in store."
Wouldn't it have been better if Clawdbot continued to monitor the website for when it came back in stock and snipe purchased it as soon as it did? Can't we move beyond lists of things and take action?
That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the technology or the science works. They just know how to shout persuasively.
I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming that full self-driving has done for driving. It will be a long time before it's perfect but it's already useful. I also think someone is going to make a Blockbuster quality movie with AI within a couple years and there will be much fretting of the brows rather than seeing the opportunity to improve the tooling here.
But I'll make a more precise prediction for 2026. Through continual learning and other tricks that emerge throughout the year, LLMs will become more personalized with longer memories, continuing to make them even more of a killer consumer product than they already are. I just see too many people conversing with them right now to believe otherwise.
> That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the technology or the science works. They just know how to shout persuasively.
These people have taken over the industry in the past 10 years.
They don't care anything about the tech or product quality. They talk smooth, loud, and fast so the leaders overlook their incompetence while creating a burden for the rest of the team.
I had a spectacular burnout a few years ago because of these brogrammers and now I have to compete with them in what feels like a red queen's race where social skills are becoming far more important than technical skills to land a job.
Social skills to get my computer to do what I want still blows my mind. Or having to talk back to it. Claude said it couldn't do something, and the way around that was too tell it "yes you can". What a weird future we live in.
What social skills? You can write in broken English and still have good results. It’s a statistical language , not a living being. No need for empathy, pleading, accusing, or manipulating. It transforms languages, any mapping from text to action was implemented by someone. And it would be way easier to have such mapping directly available.
So if you're close to retirement, that curmudgeon schtick might work out for you. But otherwise, be prepared to learn some new things or you're going to go through a few things.
I do not doubt that AI and AI-powered and -native applications will become part of the fabric of our personal and professional lives.
What I don't understand is why, outside of "because I can", people need to automate parts of life I did not know the existence of.
- Why, outside of edge cases, do people have to automate the payment of bills beyond the automatic cc processing?
- How many times a month do they have to set up their barber appointment?
It seems to me that the applications of Clawd and similar tools either automate trivial stuff or work on actions and circumstances that should not be there.
As an example, the other day I had a doctor visit, and between filling forms online, filling other forms online, confirming three times I would have been there and that I filled the online forms, driving to the doctor's office, and waiting, I probably spent 2 hours of my time (the visit was 2 months after I asked for it, by the way).
The visit lasted 5-7 minutes: the doctor did not have a look at the forms I filled out beforehand, and barely listened to what I was telling him during the visit.
I worry that, since "AI" will do it, there will be more forms to be filled that nobody will read, more forms to be filled to confirm that AI or me or a guardian filled the forms, and longer wait times because AI will bombard our neurons with some entertainment.
But what I want is a visit with a doctor who listens to me, they are not in a rush, and have my problem solved. If AI helps, it's great, but I don't want busy work done by AI, I don't want, because it is not needed, busy work at all.
I would love an AI to curate my feed to transition from enragement equals engagement to pure enchantment feeding me things it decides I would enjoy. And I think that's completely within the abilities of current models. It's just that it's less profitable than driving me into an endless doom scroll loop of despair.
And that's just off the top of my head. AI is neither good or evil, but we've made some pretty poor choices deploying it.
> Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?
I have ADHD, I forget where I put things down 5 seconds ago and I forget what's in my fridge all the time. It's genuinely a big problem for me because I let things expire, buy things I already have, and just accumulate cruft that necessitates a big fridge clean once every few months which makes me feel bad about all the things I'm throwing away.
In an ideal world I want an up to date inventory on everything that's in my fridge with expiration reminders. I'd love for someone to solve this problem in a non-tedious way. Taking pictures of everything would indeed be tedious.
Very much to the point. "Bots to remind one to check one's reminder" summarizes it all.
Note that the tendency to feel overwhelmed is rather widespread, particularly among those who need to believe that what they do is of great import, even when it isn't.
> Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?
Yeah, the sane solution here is much simpler. Put a magnet whiteboard. When you put something into the fridge, add it to the whiteboard. When you take something out, you erase that item from the whiteboard.
> Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings.
I dont know about AirBNB specifically, but I know local hotels I have dealt with can swing by 1000 bucks. Especially if theres a conference or something in town. Often it will swing back just before they risk the room going unoccupied. I have no idea if AirBNB allows similar behavior but I would be surprised if it didnt.
It's reminiscent of a few years ago when people were talking about how NFTs could open your front door, turn on your car, sign a contract, or get you in to a concert, all of which are true, but there currently exist perfectly good ways to do all of those things right now.
Yeah, a lot of these AI "uses" feel like solutions looking for a problem.
It's the equivalent of me having to press a button on the steering wheel of my Tesla and say "Open Glovebox" and wait 1-2 seconds for the glove box to open (the wonders of technology!) instead of just reaching over and pressing a button to open the glovebox instantly (a button that Tesla removed because "voice-operated controls are cool!"). Or worse, when my wife wants to open the glovebox and I'm driving she has to ask me to press the button, say the voice activated command (which doesn't work well with her voice) and then it opens. Needless to say, we never use the glovebox.
I agree with the sentiment about the post. I'm not a person who fills my life with busy though.
I quite like tactile buttons. That said, I've never been annoyed by my model 3s glove box, I use the pin. I have both stalks but the lack of other buttons seems just fine. I thought they did a pretty damn good job with the UX of the car beyond the auto wipers.
How often does one go in the glove box? It's so small and he center console is very spacious and more accessible. It's two quick taps on the screen for a passenger. If you wish to lock your glove box, many do, the solution is much better than a key.
fair points; we rarely use the glovebox because the central console is not only more accessible but also doesn't require fiddling with the touch screen to open ;)
I do agree that the UX is pretty good overall, the glovebox annoyed me (until we just stopped using it) and also the defogger (which we need all the time in the winter her) which took several taps on the screen until I discovered that I could customize the shortcut buttons at the bottom of the screen
Some automated things they definitely got right: auto-engage the emergency break while in park; auto-park when opening the door; auto-lock when leaving the car; auto-start the climate control when entering the car; auto-adjust the seat position based on driver detection.
But some things need work: The algorithm for the windshield wipers definitely needs some calibration -- the wipers come on at random times when there as no rain or water splashes; the lane departure "I'm taking control because you're going to crash" is way too sensitive and beeping at random moments; the collision sensor is also much too sensitive (yes I see the car and I'm already slowing down) (but I have to admit that I'd rather it err on the side of being too sensitive than not enough)
Tesla removed all the buttons because separately designed buttons are expensive. The glovebox button is different from the wiper button. Touchscreens are cheap because you only need one variety.
not sure if you're aware of this, but there is a broad, robust, competitive and inexpensive market for buttons of every conceivable type and function, which have the advantage of providing consistent and direct feedback when reached for, touched, and actuated.
I know why they did it. I still don’t like it (and our next car won’t be a Tesla) and its an annoying case of “new technology” (to save costs or whatever reason) that is worse than the “old technology” but sold as “better” because AI blah blah
I really appreciate your condensing of the AI problem. I think the only thing it's missing is that at least 5% of the time, when you tell it to open the glovebox it tells you it's already open and leaves it closed, or turns on your turn signals.
We have built a magic hammer that can make 100 houses in a second, but all the houses are slightly wonky, and 5% of their embedded systems are actively harmful.
True though I would take exception with “Easily” - have you seen how many taps you have to do? Not something you want to attempt while driving and certainly not easier than a hardware button.
It's two on the cybertruck, though you can customize to make it one. I'll admit it's not as easy as my old manual latch glovebox but it is safer for me while driving as I had to lean over to where I couldn't see the road before.
It's helpful to keep in mind that 'AI Twitter' is a bubble. Most people just don't have that many 'important' notes and calendar items.
People saying 'Claude is now managing my life!11' are like gearheads messing with their carburetor or (closer to this analogy) people who live out of Evernote or Roam
All that said I've been thinking for a while that tool use and discrete data storage like documents/lists etc will unlock a lot of potential in AI over just having a chatbot manipulating tokens limited to a particular context window. But personal productivity is just one slice of such use cases
Imagine letting an LLM plan your day and it just decides to exclude things, shift stuff around and make it up wholesale.
If I wanted a buggy and flawed planning system that will certainly cause problems in the future, I'd start sticking post-it notes on a wall calendar and pray they don't fall off.
More importantly, can Clawdbot even reliably access these sites? The last time I tried to build a hotel price scraper, the scraping was easy. Getting the page to load (and get around bot detection) was hard.
That’s why the author explains that the page loads in a real Google Chrome instance on a real Mac mini from the same residential IP as his other devices.
You do know that bot blockers keep track of metrics besides user agent and IP address? Hotels and concert ticket selling websites use some of the most aggressive bot blockers out there.
I do. Most of these bot blockers block bots because of scale: these bots operate with superhuman speed and their traffic comes from all sorts of IP addresses. Tools like Anubis appear because such bot traffic dwarfs human traffic. And they typically have fake User-Agent headers set to a browser while their TLS/HTTP fingerprints would suggest they are made from curl or the requests library.
This is different. There is no scale. The bot’s browsing session exactly replaces a human session. The browser is real.
it uses a real chrome browser window (that i can see when i remote desktop into the mac mini) that's been very good so far.
re: scale, is it that this whole project is worthless bc nobody needs it, or is it that its so good that scale is a requirement? this is a project i built for myself, i'm not commercializing anything
Well I read the article. It seemed to me that the way the author is using OpenClaw is trivially done manually. The author just didn’t want to use the computer and preferred to chat with an AI. You might think there is no point and I would agree.
Funnily enough at least in my personal anecdotic case it works about like that. I do just remember when my meetings will be (or look up where the meeting was decided on), do try to remember what I had planned (sometimes I forget, but almost always for the better), and written notes are rare enough that pen and paper are sufficient. And also don't have a driver license. I don't think my case is exactly rare, even among softdev croud.
And I am pretty sure every single one of those "billions of people" have had the experience of returning back from the grocery store, only to realize they were actually out of eggs.
Do you have that much trouble remembering what is in your fridge to consider this the stupidest thing you have ever read on this site? I feel superhuman.
Common internet tropes include both "look at this forgotten jar that's been in the back of my fridge since 1987" and "doesn't it suck how much food we waste in the modern world?"
Nearly every modern invention could be dismissed with this attitude. "Why do you need a typewriter? Just write on paper like the rest of the world does."
"Why do you need a notebook? Just remember everything like the rest of us do."
The solution being discussed involves someone removing everything from their fridge, photographing it and paying for an LLM to process it into a database of sorts. Further, in order for this database to be complete they need to repeat this process every time something changes in their fridge. Also will the LLM be able to tell if my carton of milk is 10% empty? I do not disagree that food waste is a problem, but the solution seems laughably impractical, and the default (memory) seems far better suited to the task. I can confidently say that the net value creation is not comparable to the written word.
Oh don't get me wrong, the solution is lacking and is probably a worse outcome than just remembering.
But suggesting "Why not just try remembering lol" isn't really a valid criticism of the process. What you said here is a real criticism that actually adds to the conversation.
He says it is for better integration between his messages and his calendar.
But this is already built-in with gmail/gcalendar. Clawdbot does take it one step further by scraping his texts and WhatsApp messages. Hmmm... I would just configure whatever is sending notifications to send to gmail so I don't need Clawdbot.
- Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings.
- Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?
- Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar?
- If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload? Maybe you can get clawdbot to remind you to check your reminders. Better yet, summarize them.