I have a lot going on. There’s Microsoft MVP stuff, Community Days, and organizing events like M365 NYC, plus personal projects, the house and the kids. That’s a lot of activity to track, and most of it lives in email.
So I wanted a personal assistant. Something that could consolidate my emails, give me action items, and whittle down my calendar. If I needed a meeting with someone, I wanted to tell it to send them my Calendly link so they could pick a time. And I wanted to do all of that by voice, from my phone.
It took three tries to get there.
OpenClaw: Amazing Until the Subscription Went Away#
I started with OpenClaw when people started talking about it. I set it up on a Linux machine, hooked it up to WhatsApp, and started talking to it and training it.
It was amazing. It was also clunky to get started with, and I built a lot of my own tools and connectors to make it work. But it worked for a really long time.
OpenClaw gave me that first taste of a major productivity boost in areas of my life other than coding. I saw the power of an agentic OS and all that nonsense people were talking about.
Then Claude stopped letting you use a subscription with OpenClaw. You had to pay separately, using API tokens, and that was a deal breaker. I was already committed to $100 a month for coding, and I wasn’t going to pay more on top of that. That was the end of OpenClaw.
Go check it out here: OpenClaw
Hermes Agent: A Lot of Work to Keep Running#
Next I moved to Hermes Agent, where I could keep using my Claude license for a while. I also tried free models and OpenAI, but they just weren’t as good. Claude was so far ahead with Opus at the time that it was hard to use anything else. I also don’t have strong enough hardware to run local models with OpenClaw or Hermes, and I really just wanted the most intelligent model at my disposal.
I didn’t want to play games messing around with less capable models. I wanted something intelligent enough that I could give it a directive, without much description, and have it do the whole thing on its own. That’s the power.
I spent a long time beefing it up, building my own connectors and plugins. I gave it access to my emails and hooked it up to Pushbullet so it could send and read messages on my phone. I could use it by voice through WhatsApp and Telegram, and it really worked as a communications assistant and a task tracker for my personal projects.
That was convenient, and it worked well for a while. Then it started giving me trouble here and there. I’d have to fix it, update it, or reboot the Linux box. I had an extra machine in the room across the hall and another server in the back room, so that’s a lot of extra equipment. Since I couldn’t use Claude with it, it ran on a low subscription and would run out of credits, and I didn’t want to pay for another one.
Eventually it just fizzled out.
Go check it out here: Hermes Agent
Grok Bot: It Has Its Own Computer#
Recently, OpenAI came out with dots, its version of this, and around the middle of October, I saw a video about Grok Bot. I really just needed something semi-autonomous, with connectors, where I didn’t have to mess with too many things. It needed its own computer, too. Grok Bot runs on its own computer in the cloud, so there’s no box for me to reboot, and it hit all the buttons.
It has connectors for my email accounts: Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, an IMAP server, and another Microsoft 365 account, plus my Community Days account. It’s connected to my time tracker so I can log time for personal projects, and to Pushbullet so it can send a text in an emergency. It also has an app, with a fully voice-activated mode, so I can just talk to it back and forth. Most of what I do is by voice now anyway, including writing these articles.
Here’s what I’ve had it do so far, all for personal projects:
- Email consolidation. All those inboxes get boiled down into one place.
- Task tracking. It keeps track of what I need to do.
- Coordination. It sends out meetings and replies to them.
- A Craigslist post. It logged in, posted for me, and let me know when someone got back to me.
- Finding a tree company. It found three, then emailed them directly for a quote.
- Site logins. It registered me for a couple of things and switched some DNS settings on my personal blog.
I’m on the entry plan, Premium, which is $30 a month. With general emailing and coordination, I’m usually at about halfway through my limit. I don’t have it do anything hardcore, and I don’t have it code for me.
Go check it out here: Grok Bot
Where Claude Still Wins#
Grok Bot is very capable, but when I’m sitting at the computer, Claude is still better.
I pop open Claude, dictate what I want, and it opens the browser and does the same thing. I can monitor it a lot closer. I can also log in myself and let it pick up from there, so I’m not sharing credentials with it. That makes me more comfortable, and I use Claude for anything where I really want control and don’t want an agent to have access.
Grok Bot stores your credentials, encrypted, so it can log you into sites over and over. That’s convenient, but it’s worth thinking about before you hand over the keys.
Where I Landed#
| Agent | What I liked | Why I moved on |
|---|---|---|
| OpenClaw | Amazing once it was trained | Subscriptions stopped working, and API tokens cost too much |
| Hermes Agent | Very capable once I built it up | Constant fixing, extra hardware, and weaker models on a low plan |
| Grok Bot | Connectors, its own computer, voice | I’m still using it |
I still use Claude Code for most of my tasks while I’m sitting at the desk. Grok Bot is great on the road, and for lower-level tasks like communication. When I need to do the heavier lifting, like configuring things, I use Claude.
