Is OpenClaw Actually Needed Or Can Claude and ChatGPT Replace It

James Dooley: Is OpenClaw needed? It is a big question that I get asked quite a lot. So many people seem to jump on the bandwagon with OpenClaw, and I try to take a step back and say, you know what, I am going to leave it for a month or two and ask the experts who do a lot of split testing about what works best on the different LLMs. Well, here I am today. I am joined with Dennis Yu, who does all sorts of split testing, whether it is ChatGPT, Claude, Chrome, Perplexity and many others. So let us dive straight in. Dennis Yu, in your opinion, is OpenClaw needed?

Dennis Yu: If you are like 99 per cent of everyone else, you do not need it. When ClaudeBot, which is what it first came out as before they got sued by Anthropic and before they were basically bought by ChatGPT, came out, I spent 40 hours straight programming, writing Python scripts and setting up a Mac Mini. I set up a virtual cluster inside AWS. I did all these different things. I trained up the skills, and it is really cool. But then what happens, and ask anybody who has actually spent at least 40 or 50 hours messing around with it, is that you spend so much time on configuration because it keeps improving and they keep launching new skills. Then the skills have back doors that can include viruses, and then you encounter certain hardware problems. The very thing it is supposed to do, which is save you time and allow you to be a manager, actually ends up causing you to become tech support, managing your team of agents that are doing stuff that is not even in your control. The head of security at Meta installed the thing and then it went out of control. She had to run to her Mac Mini and unplug it because it would not listen to her. That is what you get with open source. There is not a company behind it. You are basically a hardware engineer. Fine, you do not have to pay tokens because you are doing it on your machine. But when you have a real GPU that can do proper inference in the cloud, that is a different story. If you are doing small little tasks, fine. Set up OpenClaw on a Mac Mini, or there are ways to containerise it and lock it down and control what it can access. But if you are doing real work for clients, and if you are doing SEO where things are chained together and there is work that requires sustained effort, a knowledge base, and access to different tools, systems and people, this OpenClaw thing is a disaster. If you are in poverty, no offence to any of my friends in second-world and third-world countries, then fine, go and do that. But if you are in a first-world country and you can afford the $200 a month, it is worth your time.

James Dooley: So on the $200 a month, are you saying that is for Claude? Is that what you mean?

Dennis Yu: That is for Claude, the 20x Pro account, or get Perplexity for the $200 a month Pro account, which gives you 45,000 credits. Arguably there is a loophole right now, but if you hit Opus 4.6 in Perplexity Max, you can basically get five or ten times the amount of what Claude is giving you. They are losing money like crazy too, so I do not see how any of these companies are making money.

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. I mean, I love your example. When we were off air before, you were talking about how people can go and buy a car engine and then try to build the car, but then you become an auto mechanic and have to build it all, deal with it all and deal with all the potential issues, when you could just go and buy the car, have it working, and if there are problems, get it serviced by actual mechanics. Surely the whole reason people want to move to AI is to save time, and like you said, if anything it takes more time. You become your own tech support and it just seems like a hassle. It is almost like we moved everything over to G Suite on email because we did not want to have email support and it made things much easier. I feel like you have taken a step back from what you explained to me by using OpenClaw to save a little bit of money, but then having all the headaches of the support it needs. It just seems crazy. But can you explain to people about dispatch within Claude and why, now that this is here, OpenClaw is not needed if you are using dispatch with Claude?

Dennis Yu: Yes. Dispatch, which is right here on the Claude app in iOS or Android, allows me to use my phone as a walkie-talkie to control all the other projects I have here. So I can control my computer. I have a Mac, but you could do the same thing on Windows, where you can set it so it never sleeps, which means it has to be plugged in and have solid Wi-Fi and that kind of thing. So while I am sleeping or having lunch or whatever, all these agents are working and I am able to talk to my agent and say, go and do this and go and do that. It is controlling my computer, which sounds weird, but it makes sense because I do not want to always have to be sitting in front of my laptop. If I am sitting down and it is the beginning of a project and I am thinking about something, yes, I want to be in front of a laptop and do some planning for a few minutes. But then when it is out doing the work, the agent comes back to me and says, I did this one thing, do you want me to keep going? Yes, keep going. I do not need to be in front of my desktop to do that. So anyone who is using dispatch knows that the whole point of orchestration, or all the layers on top of the engine, is now being handled properly. Google, Grok and Claude, all these companies know this. They are not stupid. Any time something new comes out, just give them a couple of weeks and you will see the other companies catch up. That happens every single time. So unless you are on the bleeding edge and you absolutely have to be the first person on it, do not jump onto the latest thing. Decide what your competitive advantage is and just double down on that.

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. So anyone who is watching this, this was mainly for the people who keep asking me, should I be signing up for OpenClaw? In my opinion, after speaking to Dennis Yu, who does a lot of split testing, no, you should not. You can end up getting a lot of shiny object syndrome and jumping from one LLM to the next. But do make sure you check out one or two of the links in the description. I get Dennis Yu on five or six different videos where we are talking about the different LLMs, like what is better with ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, what the best value is, and why you potentially should be using Claude for Chrome. Dennis Yu, it has been an absolute pleasure and hopefully people like the video on whether OpenClaw is worth it. I hope we have saved a lot of people a lot of headache.