He Used OpenClaw To Fix His Entire Setup

By Beau Johnson · · 13 min · 971 views

Chapters

  1. 0:00Most People Build With OpenClaw
  2. 2:00The 87 Use Cases Reddit Post
  3. 4:00A Terminal That Takes 5 Seconds to Open
  4. 7:00How OpenClaw Diagnosed and Fixed It
  5. 9:00Finding 106GB of Hidden Storage
  6. 11:00Your Computer Is Your Infrastructure

About this video

We do 9 live bootcamps every week in Shipping Skool! Full courses on OpenClaw and Claude Code! Join Here ⬇️ https://www.shippingskool.com/ 🔗 GET CONTENT MACHINE: https://www.content-machine.dev/ 🤝1-1 OpenClaw Setup/Integration - https://calendly.com/beaujohnson1/ai-mastermind Most people use OpenClaw to build new things. This video is about someone who used it to maintain and repair their existing setup, recovering 106GB of hidden disk space and cutting terminal startup time from 5.3 seconds to 0.78 seconds. 00:00 Most People Build With OpenClaw 02:00 The 87 Use Cases Reddit Post 04:00 A Terminal That Takes 5 Seconds to Open 07:00 How OpenClaw Diagnosed and Fixed It 09:00 Finding 106GB of Hidden Storage 11:00 Your Computer Is Your Infrastructure Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1sjr3ep/my_87_use_cases_for_openclaw_they_became_more/ Get the weekly AI builder newsletter 📕 https://substack.com/@buildnpublic Follow Me On X - https://x.com/BeauJohnson89

Transcript

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0:00In this video, I'm going to be talking about a Reddit post that really changed my mindset on how I think about open claw and running AI agents within open claw. And I have it linked down below. You should really check it out. It will change your perspective on things. I'm just saying. You know, we cover a lot of open claw content on this channel, you know, content pipelines, sales agents, use cases, job application bots, code builders that work while you sleep. We cover all that stuff. All real, all working. But there is a category of use cases that basically no one really talks about, at least on YouTube. And this Reddit post put it in front of me in a way that, you know, I hadn't considered before. But someone in an open claw subreddit posted a thread called my 87

0:46use cases for open claw. They became more surprising over time, really. The full post is linked and you really need to check it out. I genuinely recommend reading it or have your AI agent read it and see what it thinks. You know, the person did not write about the theoretical use cases or things they heard about. They actually documented 87 actual things they used open claw for in their real life, in in their real machine. I also have an open claw use cases page within the shippingschool.com website. You should check it out. There's over 150 use cases on there, all with verified sources. I like to keep track of those just to show the proof of concept of, yeah, people are actually building real businesses with open claw. You know, halfway through the list of

1:31this whole open claw use case subreddit, the use cases really start getting more interesting. You know, most of the 87 are pretty predictable, like research, drafting emails, things like that, summarizing documents, you know, kind of more of the plain Jane type of stuff. But the two of the use cases in that list are the reason why I wanted to make this video because they represent something different, you know, not building new things, but fixing the machine you already have. So, the first one is about terminal startup time. Here's the situation, I'll just paint the picture. This person opens their terminal and it's slow. It's not just a tiny lag, you know, 5.3 to 7 seconds every time they open a new terminal tab or window. They wait over 5 seconds and

2:17I know that doesn't seem like a lot, but you got to wait for anything to actually respond. And if you're doing any kind of development work or running AI agents from the command line, you are opening terminal sessions constantly throughout the day. That adds up to a lot of waiting over time and like most people, they had just kind of accepted as the way things were. Not anymore. So, they described the problem to open claw in plain English, "My terminal is slow. Can you figure out why and fix it?" That sounds a lot like how I do it. And here is what the agent actually told him. You know, because this is the important part we need to understand. Open claw did not just explain the possible causes. Real quick, before we keep going, if you're watching this and you want to actually build with some of these tools, not just watch videos about them, then you're

3:03going to want to check out our community down below, Shipping School. We have a full Claude code course, a full open claw course, and four live bootcamps every single week where we actually help you get set up from scratch. Like actually set this thing up, not just watch a tutorial and figure it out by yourself. And we also provide one-on-one coaching, so you could book a call with me, we could share screens, and I can help you get Claude code or open claw running on your machine. That's it, no fluff. I built this community because watching YouTube's only gets you so far. We launched it just 3 days ago and we have over 55 members. You need people around you who are actually building, people who hold you accountable, and coaches who can help you when you get stuck. I'll put the link in the description down below. Get in now

3:49before the price goes up. It ran a profiling command and the command is called zshzprof and it is a built-in performance profiler that ships with a Z shell. So, when you run it, it captures timing data on every single thing that loads during the shell startup down to the millisecond. Open claw ran that command, got the output, and read through it. That's crazy. The bottleneck was something called NVM. NVM stands for Node Version Manager. A lot of developers install it at some point because it makes switching between different versions of Node.js really easy. And when they basically forget it exists. What most people do not know is that the default installation script for

4:36NVM modifies your shell config file so that NVM loads completely, fully every single time you open a terminal, regardless of whether you are doing anything related Node or not. On this person's machine, that every single behavior was responsible for about 61% of their total shell startup time. That's a long wait. This isn't an estimate. The profiler showed exactly where every millisecond was going and NVM was responsible for most of that lag. The fix is called lazy loading. Maybe you've heard the time term before. Instead of telling the shell to load at NVM at startup, you change the config so NVM only loads when you actually need

5:22it. The moment you type NVM or Node or NPM, Node Package Manager, the system recognizes it and loads the NVM right then. Otherwise, it stays out of the way completely. Open claw made that change to the shell config file, three lines, and the startup time dropped from 5.3 seconds to less than 1 second, which I think is pretty cool. I know it's not a huge one, but over time as you're building, that time adds up. That's an 85% decrease in improvement. So, but what really gets me is the path to the result, right? This person did not need to know what a Z shell profiling even was. They did not even need to know what NVM has a leading a lazy loading option.

6:08They described the system in the the symptom, the the problem, right? In plain English and the agent ran the diagnostic, it traced it to the root cause, and then it implemented the fix. I ask you, what are some problems that you're facing in your workflow right now that your agent doesn't even know about? That is what most people think, you know, that's what they think of when, you know, what an AI agent does. It's genuinely acting as a systems administrator for your own computer. Now, the second use case is even more relatable because it is something that hits basically every Mac user eventually. They were running low on disk space. You know that message, right? We all get it. Your startup disk is almost full. And when you go into storage settings, you see this breakdown

6:53with a big vague category called system data and you cannot drill into it from the normal interface. So, you are kind of stuck. You can spend an afternoon manually hunting through folders in finder, you can pay for a third-party disk cleanup tool, or you could just shrug and buy more storage or more iCloud, which is what most people do. Most people do one of those three and then they just call it a day. This person asked open claw to find the hidden storage instead. Why didn't I think of that? The agent went through their drive and found 106 GB of stuff that could be cleaned up. And not just obvious files sitting in the downloads folder, right? Real hidden storage. Old iPhone and iPad backups buried deep in library folders, backups

7:39that had been sitting there since they set up previous devices and never got deleted. Gigabytes of Xcode derived data, which is a folder that fills up automatically every time you do any kind of iOS or Mac app development and it never cleans itself up. Docker image layers from old projects that nobody needs anymore. NPM package caches, Homebrew download caches from years of updates, old system logs. Each of these categories is invisible from the normal storage interface and each of them can be deleted safely if you know what you're looking at. The agent categorized everything, showed the exact file paths, the size of each category, and explained

8:24which things were safe to remove versus which things were probably worth keeping. No cleanup app, no hours of manual folder hunting. If you're struggling to keep up with content, well, I'm about to save you about 40 days worth of work. I built something called Content Machine. It's [music] 10 AI agents that run on the open claw orchestration and they handle everything. Scripts, thumbnails, X posts, [music] blogs, outreach, clips, newsletters, all of it. So, I went from 1,000 subscribers to 4,000 subscribers on YouTube in 7 days using this exact system. Every single morning, I wake up and the content's already done. I spend maybe 15, 20 minutes reviewing and approving them and I move on with my day. It works for [music] any niche,

9:10fitness, finance, real estate, marketing, whatever you are building and it is 100% completely customizable to your use case. >> [music] >> So, you get the mission control dashboard, all of the cron jobs, everything I've built over the last 40 days helping me gain more and more people to subscribe and join the community. So, you plug in your own thing and it molds it to you. It learns how you talk and it writes so it doesn't sound like AI slop. [music] $97 one time, it's not a subscription. I'll put the link down below and you'll thank me later. In just a conversation with their open claw that resulted in over 100 GB of space coming back. So, I want to connect the dots here because I think both of these stories pointing at the same thing and it's something that does

9:55not get talked about much when people discuss AI agents. Using your open claw as your AI administrator to help diagnose your machine and make it faster, make it better for your workflow, free up space, and making the terminal faster are just two examples. What are some other things that we could do to make our systems more robust? Your computer is the infrastructure, right? And if you are building anything in the AI space right now, running an agent or developing products, managing a content pipeline, your machine is the foundation that all this runs on. A terminal that is slow every time you open it is just friction that compounds over months. A disk that is getting full starts causing weird behavior in tools, longer build times, unexpected issues. These are not

10:42glamorous problems and nobody's posting how they reclaimed disk space this week, but still it's they're real bottlenecks and they're exactly the kind of thing that open claw is positioned to handle because it has access to your system. People don't realize this. You know, most AI tools explain a problem, right? Open claw can go look at the problem on your actual machine and that is a meaningful difference. Telling you what NVM and what a lazy loading means is one thing, but running the profiler on your actual shell and making the change to your actual config file is something else entirely. I think about it like having systems engineer who basically calls, who knows their way around a Mac, and is willing to do the work, not just the bar for getting started is basically

11:28nothing, like open claw is free. You just describe what you are experiencing and then let the agent take it from there. So, here is what I want to leave you with as far as your mindset. You know, if you are running open claw and you have not thought about using it to maintain your machine, it is absolutely worth trying. Tell it your terminal feels slow or you need help diagnosing a problem. Ask it to find where your disk space is going. Ask it to look at your shell config and tell you if anything seems off. Ask it to check what is running in the background and whether any of it is unnecessary. You might be surprised by what it finds and the fix is often a lot simpler than you think. The first post with all the 87 use cases is in the description, like I said. It is a real post from a real person, not an AI bot. And this guy who went on deep

12:16with this tool, you know, and a lot of what it is in there will give you ideas you probably haven't even thought of yet. The source link is down below. You need to check it out. And if you need help building AI agents with open claw or Hermes or getting claw code going to build your first app, it's exactly why we launched the community 34 days ago now and I'm so thankful we have 204 members and we do nine live boot camp calls a week and we just added unlimited one-on-one calls. So, if you join the community, you literally get access with one-on-one calls forever. So, if you need help, join the group, it will help you one-on-one, unlimited. Or if you need to do more of a group-like setting to be held accountable, we have nine calls a week that you could jump into and share your story, get unstuck, and make progress. So, I'll put the link to

13:01that down below and if you haven't subscribed to the channel already, please do because we do videos like this every single day. We'll see you in the next one. Be blessed.

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