OpenClaw

Raised as a usability problem by 24 people on Hacker News over 1 year (2026–2026), in 17 threads.

People raised many different problems with OpenClaw, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 28 complaints

Each update breaks something, so the user spends their time using the CLI to repair it2026-08-31
Web UI is not the nicest and is awkward to use2026-06-19
Configuration pages are so confusing they made the commenter's brain melt2026-06-18
Hard to debug; setup breaks and stops replying after a few days2026-06-18
Config changes repeatedly break instant messaging access; memory search broken, heavy resource hogging2026-05-17
Docs for manual install were incomplete or broken, so the user had to give up2026-04-16
Found it fragile, needing constant fixes, and its personality off-putting2026-04-15
Competing security and permission models gridlock each other and lock the user out2026-04-15
Dashboard has many similar-looking settings pages and unintuitive categories, hard to find things2026-04-15
Every update breaks something or adds default-on features; changelog too noisy to tell what breaks2026-04-10
Hours of setup failures; install scripts and instructions don't work for installing plugin dependencies in Docker2026-03-18
Reminders and cron jobs barely work, forcing a manual workaround via heartbeat file2026-02-24
Claims it will run daily checks but never sets up the scheduled job, so the user must force it manually2026-02-21
Confusing terminology; "lan-only mode" actually binds to all interfaces, and setup wrote broken config files2026-02-21
Installing and connecting to Telegram took very long to get working2026-02-14
Tool setup takes forever and barely works; models loop through alternative tools2026-02-09
Bot constantly forgets basic instructions and misconfigures itself, crashing2026-02-08
CLI is painfully slow to respond when used2026-02-08
Append requires reading and rewriting the whole file through the LLM; write truncates files2026-02-06
/abort command works only about 1 time in 100, forcing server reboots2026-02-05
Configuration is incomprehensible and the GUI throws many console errors2026-02-05
Safe use requires migrating years of email to a burner account, too much friction2026-02-03
Memory writes truncate files and the edit tool can't append, forcing workarounds2026-02-02
Setup is complicated, default Docker setup broken, and cron jobs not working2026-02-02
No easy way to monitor agent; unclear errors and messages; landing page doesn't explain the tool2026-02-01
Install and basic features broken; cron jobs can't be created and messages get lost2026-02-01
Control panel is messy and the CLI has many confusing options2026-01-31
Skills ecosystem requires Homebrew, which doesn't work well on Raspberry Pi2026-01-31