100 Ways to Use OpenClaw.ai: From DevOps to Life Admin

Most of us treat AI like a polite librarian. We ask it questions, it gives us answers, and we move on. But that’s thinking too small. The real power unlocks when you stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like a junior employee who has access to your terminal, your file system, and your calendar.

That is exactly what OpenClaw.ai does. It connects your LLMs (local or cloud) to your actual machine, giving them the agency to do things, not just talk about them.

I’ve compiled 100 practical ways to use this tool. I’ve broken them down by category so you can skip to the parts that actually matter to you.

The Ultimate Personal Assistant (Life & Admin)

This isn't about generic "productivity tips." This is about automating the boring stuff that eats up your brainpower. Imagine dumping a voice note into WhatsApp and having it automatically parsed into your Obsidian vault.

1. Calendar Management: "Check my calendar for tomorrow and move my 2 PM meeting to 4 PM."
2. Morning Briefing: Configure a daily 7 AM message summarizing your schedule, weather, and top emails.
3. Meeting Prep: "Find the last 3 emails from John and summarize them before my call with him."
4. Smart Reminders: "Remind me to take out the trash when I get home" (using location/time triggers).
5. Travel Itineraries: Have it scan your email for flight/hotel confirmations and compile a trip PDF.
6. Shopping Lists: "Add milk to my shopping list file" (appends to a local .txt or .md file).
7. Bill Payments: "Remind me to pay the electric bill on the 15th of every month."
8. Time Tracking: "Log start time for Project X" (writes to a spreadsheet or time-tracking API).
9. Journaling: Dictate your daily thoughts via WhatsApp; OpenClaw saves them to a structured local Obsidian vault.
10. Habit Tracking: "Did I exercise today?" (Updates a local habit tracker file).
11. Email Triage: "Archive all newsletters from the last 24 hours."
12. Auto-Reply Drafts: "Draft a polite decline to this invitation and show it to me for approval."
13. Contact Management: "Update Sarah's phone number in my contacts file."
14. Birthday Alerts: Check a local database and message you a week before a friend's birthday.
15. Gift Ideas: "Search for gift ideas for a tech-loving dad under $50."
16. WhatsApp to Email: Forward urgent WhatsApp messages to your work email.
17. Telegram to Discord: "Post this update to the 'Announcements' channel in Discord."
18. Translation: "Translate this incoming Spanish message to English automatically."
19. Voice Transcripts: Transcribe voice notes sent to the bot into text.
20. Meeting Notes: Paste raw notes into chat; ask OpenClaw to format them for Slack.
21. Slack Status: "Set my Slack status to 'In a Meeting' for 1 hour."
22. Group Chat Moderator: Remove messages containing banned words in a group chat.
23. RSS Feed Feeder: Fetch RSS updates and post them to a private Telegram channel.
24. SMS Relay: (If connected to Android) "Send an SMS to Mom saying I'll be late."
25. Announcement Broadcast: Send a message to multiple designated contacts at once.
26. Flashcards: "Quiz me on Spanish vocabulary."
27. Book Summary: "Give me the key takeaways from 'Atomic Habits'."
28. Coding Tutor: "Explain how a Python Decorator works with an example."
29. Trivia: "Ask me a random history trivia question."
30. Debate Partner: "Pretend to be against Universal Basic Income and argue with me."

DevOps & System Administration

If you run a home lab or manage servers, OpenClaw is basically a superpower. It can run scripts, check logs, and monitor ports without you needing to SSH in every five minutes.

31. Server Monitoring: "Ping my VPS every hour and message me if it's down."
32. Log Analysis: "Read the last 100 lines of /var/log/syslog and summarize any errors."
33. Deployments: "Trigger the deploy script for the staging environment."
34. Database Backups: "Run a pg_dump of the production DB and save it to the backup folder."
35. Disk Space Watchdog: "Alert me if my hard drive has less than 10GB free."
36. Git Operations: "Pull the latest changes from the main branch on my current project."
37. Docker Management: "List all running containers" or "Restart the Nginx container."
38. Network Speed Test: "Run a speed test and report the results."
39. SSL Expiry Check: "Check if the SSL certificate for my website is expiring soon."
40. Package Updates: "Run apt update and list available upgrades" (requires sudo config).
41. IP Address Check: "What is my current public IP address?"
42. Port Scanning: "Scan my local network for open ports on the Raspberry Pi."
43. Service Restart: "Restart the Apache service."
44. Cloud Cost Report: Use CLI tools (AWS/Azure) to fetch and report yesterday's cloud spend.
45. Cron Job Management: "List all active cron jobs on this machine."
46. Password Generation: "Generate a secure 20-character password."
47. Data Redaction: "Remove all email addresses from this text file."
48. Local LLM Switching: "Switch to using a local Llama 3 model for privacy."
49. Audit Logs: "Show me the command history of what you executed today."
50. Panic Button: "Execute 'Lockdown Mode'" (custom script to unmount drives/disconnect net).

File System & Data Organization

I hate organizing files. I usually just dump everything in "Downloads" and pray. OpenClaw can actually clean up that mess for you.

51. File Sorting: "Move all .jpg files from Downloads to the Pictures folder."
52. Bulk Renaming: "Rename all screenshots in this folder to screenshot_DATE format."
53. Duplicate Finder: "Scan my Documents folder for duplicate files."
54. PDF Merging: "Combine contract.pdf and signature.pdf into one file."
55. Image Conversion: "Convert all PNGs in this folder to WebP."
56. Video Compression: "Use FFMPEG to compress this video file to 720p."
57. Text Extraction: "OCR this scanned invoice and save the text to a file."
58. Zip Archiving: "Zip the 'Project Alpha' folder and email it to me."
59. Folder Cleanup: "Delete all files in the Temp folder older than 7 days."
60. Search Local Files: "Find all files containing the phrase 'Budget 2025'."
61. Backup Sync: "Run an Rclone sync to move local photos to Google Drive."
62. Encryption: "Encrypt this sensitive file using GPG."
63. Spreadsheet Manipulation: "Read data.csv and tell me the total sum of Column C."
64. Metadata Stripping: "Remove EXIF data from these photos."
65. Code Formatting: "Run Prettier on all JS files in this directory."

Web Automation & Research

This is where it gets fun. Instead of manually checking 10 websites every morning, you just ask the agent to go do it.

66. News Digest: "Go to TechCrunch, read the headlines, and summarize the top 3 stories."
67. Price Watch: "Check the price of this product on Amazon every day and alert me if it drops."
68. Competitor Monitoring: "Visit these 3 competitor websites and tell me if they changed their homepage."
69. Stock Market Check: "Get the current price of AAPL and MSFT."
70. Flight Scraper: "Check flights from NYC to London for Dec 1st and report the cheapest option."
71. Web Summaries: "Read this URL and give me 5 bullet points."
72. Form Filling: "Go to this URL and fill out the contact form with my details."
73. Screenshotting: "Take a screenshot of my website's homepage and send it to me."
74. SEO Check: "Check the meta tags on my blog post URL."
75. Broken Link Checker: "Scan my personal site for 404 errors."
76. Weather Report: "Go to a weather site and get the 7-day forecast."
77. Recipe Scraper: "Extract the ingredients list from this recipe URL."
78. Fact Checking: "Search Google to verify if this statement is true."
79. Social Media Monitoring: "Search Twitter/X for mentions of my brand name."
80. YouTube Summary: "Get the transcript of this YouTube video and summarize it."

Smart Home & Coding Assistance

Finally, for the developers and smart home enthusiasts, you can hook this up to your local network or use it as a pair programmer that actually knows your codebase.

81. Light Control: "Turn off the office lights" (via Philips Hue/Home Assistant integration).
82. Thermostat: "Set the temperature to 72 degrees."
83. Camera Check: "Grab a snapshot from the security camera."
84. Door Lock: "Is the front door locked?"
85. Music Control: "Play my 'Focus' playlist on Sonos."
86. TV Remote: "Pause the TV" (via Roku/Apple TV API).
87. 3D Printer Watch: "Check the status of my OctoPrint server."
88. Vacuum: "Start the Roomba."
89. Network Wake-up: "Send a Wake-on-LAN packet to my gaming PC."
90. Energy Monitor: "Report the current power usage from my smart plug."
91. Code Review: "Read main.py and suggest improvements."
92. Bug Fixing: "Here is an error log; look at the code and tell me what's wrong."
93. Boilerplate Generation: "Create a basic index.html with Tailwind CSS setup."
94. Documentation Writer: "Read this function and write a DocString for it."
95. SQL Query Builder: "Write a SQL query to select users who signed up last week."
96. Regex Helper: "Write a Regex to match email addresses."
97. Unit Test Creator: "Write a Jest test file for this React component."
98. API Testing: "Send a POST request to this endpoint and show the response."
99. Library Search: "Find a Python library for PDF generation."
100. Environment Setup: "Write a docker-compose.yml for a LAMP stack."

Official Links

• Website: https://openclaw.ai

Conclusion

The point here isn't to set up all 100 of these. That would be insane. The point is to pick the two or three that solve an actual headache for you. Maybe it’s the receipt parsing, or maybe it’s just restarting that one Docker container that always crashes.

Start small. Automate one thing. Then see where it takes you.