OpenClaw Isn’t Turnkey Yet — Here’s What It’s Like to Actually Use It
After two weeks using OpenClaw day to day, it feels powerful but not turnkey. Here is what worked, what broke, and why I would still treat it as a development project.
After two weeks using OpenClaw day to day, it feels powerful but not turnkey. Here is what worked, what broke, and why I would still treat it as a development project.
After one week with OpenClaw and my AI assistant Kelex, the biggest lesson is simple: local AI assistants are powerful, useful, and still need serious guardrails.
Atlas removed GPT and shortcut access from the sidebar, but you can recreate much of that workflow by saving reusable prompts as markdown files and attaching them directly inside Atlas.
The useful answer is not whether the product sounds good, but whether it earns a place in the workflow after the first impression wears off.
Photoshop now works inside ChatGPT, but it only behaves like real Photoshop when you trigger the Adobe Photoshop tool correctly. Otherwise, ChatGPT may fall back to DALL·E-style image editing.
Atlas removed slash commands from the Ask sidebar, which means quick access to GPT-based shortcuts is gone for now. If your workflows depended on them, Comet currently handles this better.
I tested Comet and Atlas on a real browser automation task: filling missing product descriptions in a Kit.co everyday carry page. Comet got through the workflow Atlas could not chain together.
OpenAI Atlas has real potential as an AI browser, but it is not ready to replace Comet yet. The biggest issues are agent mode limits, missing profiles, weak extension integration, and no DOM browsing.
Google Gemini glasses could change the AI glasses conversation by tying voice, search, maps, Gmail, and YouTube into something more useful than camera-first social glasses.
Gemini 2.5 Flash Image can repair and colorize old family photos quickly, but the best results came from damaged black-and-white images. Newer photos mostly saw cleanup, and some faces may change slightly.
September’s tech calendar is lining up around Apple’s iPhone 17 event, Meta Connect smart glasses updates, and growing OpenAI rumors around a browser and possible AI device.
DIA and Perplexity Comet both add AI to a Chromium browser, but they feel very different: DIA is better as a research and writing helper, while Comet can actually act on webpages.