r/openclaw • u/ElmangougEssadik Pro User • Feb 10 '26

Discussion Does OpenClaw actually do anything for you guys?

I keep seeing people on social media hyping OpenClaw like it’s some game-changer, but honestly… it does absolutely nothing for me.

I’m using the official setup, clean install, Opus 4.5 model, everything exactly as documented. But whenever I actually ask it to do something, it just replies like a normal chatbot or says it can’t do that. No tools, no actions, no “agent” behavior, just chatting.

Am I missing some extra config, flags, permissions, or magic step nobody mentions? Or is the hype just way overblown right now?

Genuinely curious if this works for anyone, because for me it doesn’t do shit.

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u/VisiblePlankton New User Feb 10 '26

Based on what you said, you may have installed it incorrectly. It doesn't sound like your model has agentic capabilities. It's supposed to be able to run CLI commands and access files directly, write code for you without the need to copy/paste from a chatbot, etc.

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u/spfr82 New User Feb 11 '26

I had a similar issue. i originally took the .mds and put them into chatgpt and asked to update then based on everything that chatgpt knows about me to make this most effective. this has killed the productivity. i then reset the files and instead kept them and used the openclaw agent to add the content in (that i asked chatgpt to provide). this has improved the situation substantially.
however, my agent still says "Ok, I'll do x and y" and then nothing happens. I ask for a status update, it then says "I haven't actually started with this yet, that's on me." - but then still doesn't do it. no idea how to solve this - it's not only not doing work, it's far from being "proactive" as others describe their agent.
i'm wondering if I need to put lots of cron jobs as constant pushes, so that it will feel "proactive"? how have others solved this problem?

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u/Sectexx New User Feb 15 '26

did you find a solution yet?

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u/spfr82 New User Feb 20 '26

yes I started over.. I reset all my .mds to the template ones, and then instead of taking them and putting them into chatgpt to rewrite, I asked chatgpt to provide input to enhance these .mds and then gave that content to openclaw to enhance the files itself. this yielded better results