I'm using openclaw as a personal development bot, which is pretty useful. It pings me throughout the day using crons to complete tasks and follows up on them. But aside from that, it is a very unreliable piece of software. I'm constantly having to fix it, or track down correct configurations. It can just decide to randomly edit it's own config, uses incorrect json keys and then the whole thing is dead. Or it blows through it's context and doesn't know to compact. Then it's just stuck. I can't wait till it matures or something more reliable comes along.
I love the concept but I've never hosted such a terrible piece of software. Every update breaks something new or introduces another "anti-feature" that's enabled by default.
The documentation is often lagging behind and the changelog has such a low signal to noise ratio that you need a LLM to figure out what upgrading will break this time. For now I've just given up on updates and I've been patching bugs directly in the JS when they bother me enough.
If OpenClaw is the future of software I'm honestly a bit scared for the industry.
I'm open to suggestions, I tried Zeroclaw and Nullclaw but they're bad in their own way. I would like something that's easy to run on Kubernetes with WhatsApp integration and most important, stable releases.
> If OpenClaw is the future of software I'm honestly a bit scared for the industry.
I think it's mainly the industry wannabes gathering around a "sexy" brand name again, when they're really more interested in "AI as personal assistants".
OpenClaw just has the most traction despite being a hot mess, because the people hyping it up don't know how bad the codebase is, or because they want to launch something first and switch it over to a more credible alternative after.
Thanks for this suggestion, I installed it yesterday after seeing this comment and this surely is a breath of fresh air! It appears that everything is designed reasonably well from the ground up. It’s more limited, but what’s there works well.
Yeah I’m amazed how much constantly breaks between every release, I’m dreading to update it. I’m using it as a kind of personal assistant that keeps track of all my outstanding work. Morning and evening briefing, can get an overview of what I did per week / month, it’s pretty solid for keeping track of all this.
But it’s so terribly unstable, it’s as if nobody actually tests things before pushing a release. I don’t need 2 updates per day, I just need one every few weeks that’s stable.
I had the same experience, now I just have a simple claude code session running with the new channel feature so it can take input and give output via a telegram bot.
It's not as fun with SOUL.md etc but so far much less janky.
You realize that SOUL.md is nothing more than prompt injection, right? It's not a magical configuration file that gives an LLM a "soul". It's just anthropomorphizing a part of the prompt. It's also an expanded burn on tokens and, potentially, your money.
But if you think you need an agent framework to use a prompt you're going to love this one simple trick...
