Much like people have different takes on the right way to do the SDLC, we're gonna see a lot of takes on orchestration. None of are really that meaningful until we unblock on validation, but to the extent that they also come with observability tools, they're at least useful there. I'm dubious of agent specific silo'd task management though, that should be surfaced to entire teams.
Haven't dug as much as I would like to into OpenClaw, but why is there so much hype around it? I don't understand the appeal of using it as a replacement for Claude Code.
Venturing a guess. Its the hype of the non-technical automation crowd. APIs are hard for these people to grok and work with. The others are the engineering/dev/product crowd, the best among them have a high BS detector threshold. The former are a lot more numerically and its why the hype is so high.
Whereas the former see things talking to each other across boundaries with a minimal set up, the latter might look at it and see/say: "hard leaky abstractions"/"Poor security model"/"High $/task", you can't you build/sell it.
Where the latter crowd might exclaim: "Look my slack bot can confirm with my doctor when calendar appointment is near. SaaS tools are dead!". The engineering/dev/product are more sceptical and they are right to be so.
OpenClaw is more of a resident AI. It's always running, has access to loads of systems beyond coding (eg email, calendar, browser), and you have many ways to talk to it (like WhatsApp, Signal etc).
It's also an atomic bomb of a security hole waiting to explode.
It's not a replacement for claude code, the people using it are typically somewhat less technical and might use it to code but are primarily interested in automations (particularly ones they can post about on social media).
We're all hustling to stay relevant because we're caught in a cutthroat game of musical chairs as our industry gets automated, and there's little incentive to polish anything before releasing since 90% of the time you'll just get ignored regardless, so you might as well see if your project/landing page hooks before burning a bunch of time.
I polish stuff before promoting because I'm averse to reputation damage, but every day that I see people not doing that and getting upvotes anyhow makes the practice harder to justify.
In games, AIs usually communicate with a blackboard. Grokboard would rhyme but implies xAI associations. Flockboard? Not so nice sounding but accurate.
These are all proto orchestrators. No one has discovered/converged on what agent orchestration actually looks like.
Other projects include conductor.build, gas town (infamously), and others.
Another layer of abstraction in the infinite castle of computer science.
1: https://www.vibekanban.com/
please hold for the non-existent cdn while we download 372 fonts
Whereas the former see things talking to each other across boundaries with a minimal set up, the latter might look at it and see/say: "hard leaky abstractions"/"Poor security model"/"High $/task", you can't you build/sell it.
Where the latter crowd might exclaim: "Look my slack bot can confirm with my doctor when calendar appointment is near. SaaS tools are dead!". The engineering/dev/product are more sceptical and they are right to be so.
It's also an atomic bomb of a security hole waiting to explode.
Really makes me want to be here.
I polish stuff before promoting because I'm averse to reputation damage, but every day that I see people not doing that and getting upvotes anyhow makes the practice harder to justify.
Kanclaw
Clawban
Clawboard
Clawlo
Clask (Claw-task)