Yuffie Bot
Building an AI assistant on a Mac Mini with OpenClaw — what works, what doesn't, and why the productivity gurus are lying.
Given that like, 99% of this site has been vibe coded so far, I only thought it appropriate to talk about the latest project that’s been taking the web by storm. About two weeks ago, I started digging deeper into Claude Code, and thus was following X accounts, subreddits, and having my insomniac Google feed personalize itself based off of my ‘latest interests.’ It’s been inescapable with these algorithms to not run into ClawdBot, and I decided to dip into my shopaholic tendencies and buy a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw on.
Turns out that having an Assistant AI is super fun!
It also turns out that building one of these things and asking it some generic requests “run my business for me” is a pipe dream. My bot can’t even complete basic commands, and every time I try to tweak my morning cron job it fails to send. Yes, I’m using GPT-5.2 (5.3 now), and yes, when I’ve pointed Opus at a problem it usually solves it - but it needs so. much. handholding. Those YouTube creators that claim it’s suddenly increasing their productivity are lying - there isn’t that much more that OpenClaw adds other than a good cron job and heartbeat to move things along (I’m looking at you, Alex Finn).
But building this is fun, so I’ll continue. The useful use cases aren’t things that you can think about - they’re the things that you don’t have enough time to work on, so they aren’t top of mind. Something I’ve found helpful is to have my Yuffie bot summarize my non-important email and surface emails like newsletters or major discounts that I’m actually interested in.