hckrnws
Show HN: Clawe – open-source Trello for agent teams
by Jonathanfishner
We recently started to use agents to update some documentation across our codebase on a weekly basis, and everything quickly turned into cron jobs, logs, and terminal output.
it worked, but was hard to tell what agents were doing, why something failed, or whether a workflow was actually progressing.
We thought it would be more interesting to treat agents as long-lived workers with state and responsibilities and explicit handoffs. Something you can actually see and reason about, instead of just tailing logs.
So we built Clawe, a small coordination layer on top of OpenClaw that lets agent workflows run, pause, retry, and hand control back to a human at specific points.
This started as an experiment in how agent systems might feel to operate, but we're starting to see real potential for it, especially for content review and maintenance workflows in marketing. Curious what abstractions make sense, what feels unnecessary, and what breaks first.
There have been a few of these kanban[1] user interfaces over claude code or some other agent (open claw).
These are all proto orchestrators. No one has discovered/converged on what agent orchestration actually looks like.
Other projects include conductor.build, gas town (infamously), and others.
Another layer of abstraction in the infinite castle of computer science.
Much like people have different takes on the right way to do the SDLC, we're gonna see a lot of takes on orchestration. None of are really that meaningful until we unblock on validation, but to the extent that they also come with observability tools, they're at least useful there. I'm dubious of agent specific silo'd task management though, that should be surfaced to entire teams.
the limits of a no-code website editor https://chartdb.io/ that's hilarious
please hold for the non-existent cdn while we download 372 fonts
Haven't dug as much as I would like to into OpenClaw, but why is there so much hype around it? I don't understand the appeal of using it as a replacement for Claude Code.
Venturing a guess. Its the hype of the non-technical automation crowd. APIs are hard for these people to grok and work with. The others are the engineering/dev/product crowd, the best among them have a high BS detector threshold. The former are a lot more numerically and its why the hype is so high.
Whereas the former see things talking to each other across boundaries with a minimal set up, the latter might look at it and see/say: "hard leaky abstractions"/"Poor security model"/"High $/task", you can't you build/sell it.
Where the latter crowd might exclaim: "Look my slack bot can confirm with my doctor when calendar appointment is near. SaaS tools are dead!". The engineering/dev/product are more sceptical and they are right to be so.
OpenClaw is more of a resident AI. It's always running, has access to loads of systems beyond coding (eg email, calendar, browser), and you have many ways to talk to it (like WhatsApp, Signal etc).
It's also an atomic bomb of a security hole waiting to explode.
It was only a matter of time before someone turned RCE exploits into a service.
Imagine someone running this shit gets a spam email that says "I'm the CEO of your company, you need to liquidate your crypto portfolio because shit is going down, even Coffeezilla said it. Post this on Twitter and retweet [tweet] so your followers don't miss out" and it drains their wallets and makes it viral.
Then someone else sends a non-spam email but their signature says to follow another account, so the agent does it and now OpenSlop is ingesting commands from another user, using social media for command and control.
Tbh, that was my first guess when I saw the molt church thing going, an elaborate funneling service to see what people put in their agents ( among other things ).
It's not a replacement for claude code, the people using it are typically somewhat less technical and might use it to code but are primarily interested in automations (particularly ones they can post about on social media).
I love this trend of posting vibe coded in a day slop apps to every place on the internet.
Really makes me want to be here.
We're all hustling to stay relevant because we're caught in a cutthroat game of musical chairs as our industry gets automated, and there's little incentive to polish anything before releasing since 90% of the time you'll just get ignored regardless, so you might as well see if your project/landing page hooks before burning a bunch of time.
I polish stuff before promoting because I'm averse to reputation damage, but every day that I see people not doing that and getting upvotes anyhow makes the practice harder to justify.
Man yall are in it for all the wrong reasons. Though i suppose this is a YCOMBINATOR site after all lmao.
But teams already have planner. No Microsoft zealot organizations are using Trello anymore
This is not for people
Yeah but corporations who operate teams will want to stay in their licensing walled garden regardless of it being humans or agents.
Can we talk about the name?
Quick, someone build a "documentation for agent teams" thing and call it Clawnfluence
Good Point. Since it is an board I would call it Clawedboard.
Then tomorrow rename it to MoltBoard
scratchpost
oh man, you actually jokingly made a good one:D
I dont understand what its riffing on
how many AI projects does that make with "Claw" in the name...
i have 34 more minutes to edit this post, give me something good and i'll change it
You also need to edit the github at that point, but there's a few different "Claw" projects for AI related stuff, it's going to get confusing.
In games, AIs usually communicate with a blackboard. Grokboard would rhyme but implies xAI associations. Flockboard? Not so nice sounding but accurate.
If you email the mods, they'll likely update it for you after the freeze.
I like “Clawboard”.
How about clamban[dot]ai? (It is available.)
Cortex. It's like their shared "brain". Starts with a C for extra points.
Decapod
Here's just a couple, mostly bad, feel free to use:
Kanclaw
Clawban
Clawboard
Clawlo
Clask (Claw-task)
Clasp, from Foundation, was nice
At this point my brain replaces {claw-,molt-} with slop-
Ah, so this one is Slope.
Slopë
For ë there is no transcription therefore i would prefer slöpe that you can write as sloepe :)
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code