Their agent watches the school website and pings them about new activities
The current after-school activities end in March, and they'd been told to watch for new ones. Four chat messages had OpenClaw write a skill that checks daily at 10:30am. They still call it unreliable.
Done withOpenClawSpotted· by HN user BeetleB· Oct 18, 2026
Result Four chat messages, sent from anywhere
“Hey, can you go to the site and give me all the afterschool activities and their start dates?”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
They told their OpenClaw instance to go to the school’s website, list all the after-school activities and their start dates, then write a skill that does that and notifies them if an activity starts in March or April. They tested the skill manually, confirmed it worked, and then had OpenClaw schedule the check for 10:30am every day.
How it went
It’s four short chat messages they can send from anywhere, even on a grocery errand, without doing it all at once. They still call OpenClaw “currently unreliable”.
Try it yourself with OpenClaw
Tell [your agent] to visit [a specific web page you want monitored], list the relevant items and their dates, then write a reusable skill that repeats that check and notifies you only when [your condition, e.g. a new item starts in a given month]. Test the skill manually, confirm it works, then ask the agent to schedule it to run automatically every day.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
Hospital paperwork needed sorting, some in a language still being learned. An OpenClaw agent scanned 34 pages, flagged missing signatures and drafted an insurance pre-approval for review.
Quotes needed from shower glass suppliers in the area. OpenClaw researched them, sent out the emails, collated the responses and handled the back-and-forth, all in one chat thread.
At dinner the idea came up: St. Patrick's Day lights instead of Valentine's. One chat message to OpenClaw, which researched the WLED controller's API and set a well-chosen theme.
Finding the thread, looking up details, drafting the reply: their OpenClaw on a spare Mac mini does it all and hands over a draft to edit and send. Ideas for small family apps come back deployed.
The same tech questions, again and again. Their OpenClaw answers the family's FAQs in a group chat, remembers what's been asked, and quizzes everyone now and then on past questions.
Wanting their son to grow up around books, they hooked OpenClaw to their Goodreads list to scan local used bookstores for titles to buy. They say they've never read as much or enjoyed it as much as now.