Today is May 22, 2026. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but those sensational social media posts claiming “secured a 7-figure deal in half an hour using OpenClaw” haven’t appeared on our feeds for almost three months. This open-source AI assistant, which once racked up over 370,000 stars on GitHub, has quietly died out.
Why Did This Lobster Stop Crawling?
Looking at this smiling lobster, who would have thought installing it nearly made my computer catch fire.
If you scrolled through Twitter or Xiaohongshu a few months ago, OpenClaw was treated like a cyber-god. Sporting a red lobster avatar, it claimed it could take over everything on your computer.
But what about the reality? Just try installing it yourself and you’ll find out. The dependency configuration for this thing is an absolute nightmare. If your Node.js version is slightly off, it spews a screen full of glaring red errors. If your hardware is just a bit lacking, the process inexplicably dies mid-run. It’s like wanting to eat some celery and pork dumplings for dinner, but being forced to grow a pot of wheat on your balcony first.
What ordinary person can tolerate this hassle?
98% Hype and 2% Code
A few days ago, Andriy Burkov mercilessly exposed its reality on LinkedIn. According to him, 98% of this project is media hype, and the actual core code might only be 2%.
That sounds a bit harsh, but it hits the nail on the head. Its highly-touted “automated browser control” capability isn’t actually something it wrote itself. It’s entirely Microsoft’s open-source Playwright library doing the heavy lifting. The so-called visual understanding is just a wrapper around existing large models; they merely wrote a middleware to glue the two together.
On a side note, I used to use Playwright every day for writing web scrapers. Why didn’t it cross my mind to slap a UI over it and scam tens of thousands of stars on GitHub? I guess that was my blind spot.
They even created an AI-exclusive social platform, which is a wildly imaginative move.
Speaking of which, forcibly stitching underlying permissions and toolchains together, and then issuing commands via Telegram or WhatsApp, is indeed technically clever. But the hidden risks are massive. Even the official maintainers warned in Discord that “noobs” who don’t understand the command line should absolutely stay away.
Just looking at this architecture design tells you that anyone daring to hand over full read/write permissions of underlying files to it is incredibly brave.
Think about it: could a tool with porous security safeguards, capable of wiping out local files if you’re not careful, ever be deployed at scale in a corporate environment? No chance.
Titans Clash, and the Lobster Gets Crushed
Let’s broaden our perspective and do a lateral comparison with the real heavyweights on the market.
First, look at the big tech moves. The Mac version of Claude’s Computer Use is already delving into system-level interactions. Cursor, on the other hand, lets you comfortably act as an overseer within the editor while it diligently writes the code. Whether it’s interaction or stability, the experience is seamless.
To put it bluntly, using OpenClaw feels like cramming a Ferrari engine into a drafty tractor. It makes a lot of noise, but it’s constantly stalling out.
You ask it to send an email, and it might just freeze entirely due to a dependency conflict. A 30% failure rate—meaning for every ten complex tasks you assign it, three might be botched or ruined. For someone who actually needs to get work done on their desktop, unreliability is unforgivable.
A Pioneer Navigating the Minefield
Sometimes I wonder, is this lobster truly worthless?
Truthfully, no. It actually proved, in an incredibly brutal way, a market pain point that even the tech giants haven’t fully resolved. People are absolutely desperate for a dedicated AI that runs locally, doesn’t snoop on private data, and doesn’t require paying exorbitant cloud computing fees. Many bought into the hype not because OpenClaw was so great to use, but because the world has suffered from the “cloud monopoly” for far too long.
The explosion of demand for local, private deployment over the past few months shows it was essentially the one that kicked that door open. If, in the coming months, Apple or Microsoft integrates a similar “true local assistant” into the system level, won’t it instantly obliterate all these open-source wrapper products? Maybe I’m overthinking it; after all, big corporate ships are hard to turn, and their product moves are always half a beat slow.
But this is often how history’s script goes. The pioneers are responsible for clearing the mines in the mud, while the giants swoop in to reap the rewards on a paved highway.
#
Today the sky in Jinan is gloomy and the wind is quite strong; it looks like it’s about to rain. I need to go to the balcony and move my succulents indoors, and it’s time to give my computer fan a break.
References:
- OpenClaw is already dead – by Jay Bhatti – SEO is Dead
- OpenClaw Hype vs Reality: 98% Hype, 2% Code | Andriy Burkov
- OpenClaw’s AI assistants are now building their own social network | TechCrunch
—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ.
