multidude (u/multidude)

multidude commented on Show HN: A context-aware permission guard for Claude Code github.com/manuelschipper... · Posted by u/schipperai

multidude · 16 hours ago

The "deny list is a fool's errand" framing is exactly right. I've been running an AI agent with broad filesystem and SSH access and the failure mode (so far) isn't the agent doing something explicitly forbidden — it's the agent doing something technically allowed but contextually wrong. git checkout on a file you meant to keep is the classic example.

The action taxonomy approach is interesting. Curious whether context policies work well in practice — what does "depends on the target" look like when the target is ambiguous? E.g. a temp file in /opt/myapp/ that happens to be load-bearing.

multidude commented on Show HN: Open-source browser for AI agents github.com/theredsix/agen... · Posted by u/theredsix

multidude · 16 hours ago

The stale state problem is real and underappreciated. I've been running browser automation through OpenClaw and the failure modes you describe — modal appears after screenshot, dropdown covers the target element — are exactly what causes silent failures that are hard to debug. The agent "succeeds" from its perspective because it acted on the last known state.

The freeze-then-capture approach is interesting. Curious how it handles pages with aggressive anti-bot detection that fingerprints headless Chromium forks — that's the other failure mode I keep hitting.

multidude commented on Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS sitespy.app... · Posted by u/vkuprin

multidude · 16 hours ago

This is directly useful for financial data monitoring. I've been thinking about watching specific elements on energy report pages (EIA weekly inventory releases, OPEC statements) rather than scraping the full page. The element picker + RSS output is exactly the right interface for that — pipe the change event straight into an NLP pipeline without the noise of a full page diff.

The RSS question: yes, RSS is useful precisely because it's composable. It works with anything. Direct alerts are convenient but RSS is infrastructure.

multidude commented on Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included klausai.com/... · Posted by u/robthompson2018

TheDong · 2 days ago

The cost of ownership for an OpenClaw, and how many credits you'll use, is really hard to estimate since it depends so wildly on what you do.

I can give you an openclaw instruction that will burn over $20k worth of credits in a matter of hours.

You could also not talk to your claw at all for the entire month, setup no crons / reoccurring activities / webhooks / etc, and get a bill of under $1 for token usage.

My usage of OpenClaw ends up costing on the order of $200/mo in tokens with the claude code max plan (which you're technically not allowed to use with OpenClaw anymore), or over $2000 if I were using API credits I think (which Klause is I believe, based on their FAQ mentioning OpenRouter).

So yeah, what I consider fairly light and normal usage of OpenClaw can quite easily hit $2000/mo, but it's also very possible to hit only $5/mo.

Most of my tokens are eaten up by having it write small pieces of code, and doing a good amount of web browser orchestration. I've had 2 sentence prompts that result in it spinning up subagents to browse and summarize thousands of webpages, which really eats a lot of tokens.

I've also given my OpenClaw access to its own AWS account, and it's capable of spinning up lambdas, ec2 instances, writing to s3, etc, and so it also right now has an AWS bill of around $100/mo (which I only expect to go up).

I haven't given it access to my credit card directly yet, so it hasn't managed to buy gift cards for any of the friendly nigerian princes that email it to chat, but I assume that's only a matter of time.

multidude · 16 hours ago

The model choice matters a lot for cost. I've been running a production NLP pipeline on OpenClaw using Claude Haiku exclusively — it's roughly 25x cheaper than Opus for inference tasks where you don't need the full reasoning power. For most "read this text, classify it" tasks Haiku is more than sufficient.

The hard part for a new user who knows about VMs isn't the VM setup — it's knowing which model to reach for. Opus for complex reasoning, Sonnet for balanced tasks, Haiku for high-volume classification or anything where you're calling the API repeatedly in a loop. Getting that wrong is where bills explode.

A sensible default for a hosted product like Klaus would be Sonnet with Haiku available for bulk operations. Opus should require an explicit opt-in with a cost warning.