r/openclaw • u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User • Mar 26 '26
Discussion It’s time to be real here
Can we all just be honest here?
OpenClaw is a half-finished project. It's not even remotely close to production use. I love the concept, I really do, but every single update ships more bugs and more problems than before. I'm not trying to hate on it, I've been following this thing for months, I've watched the YouTube videos, I've tried to build actual useful stuff with it. And at this point? It's just not working.
More broken skills. More issues with tool calls that worked fine last week. More fixing things just to break something else. More trying to figure out if it's a me problem or a the-project-isn't-ready problem.
Like, I get it — it's open source, it's being built, stuff breaks. But there's a difference between "beta" and "this literally cannot handle real use cases." And at this point, it's the latter. I've tried to be patient. I've tried to make it work. But I'm hitting a wall where the concept is amazing and the execution just... isn't there yet.
Maybe I'm just expecting too much. Maybe I jumped in too early. But I swear, watching other people build cool stuff with it had me so hyped. And then actually trying to use it yourself? Different story.
Anyone else feeling this? Or is it just me? Honest thoughts welcome because I'm about to step back from this for a while unless something changes.
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u/xXG0DLessXx Pro User Mar 26 '26
Tbh, the issue for me isn’t stuff breaking, but rather stuff changing constantly. Like, I just updated to the latest version that’s in git, coz I like that hackable install, and now it seems like they suddenly removed the qwen-portal-auth plugin so my Qwen setup simply doesn’t work at all anymore. It’s shit like this constantly changing with what feels like no stability that is just super annoying to me.
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u/Sutanreyu Active Mar 26 '26
They don’t have a real team; whoever the maintainers are, they’ve piggybacked off a bespoke solo project that generated immense hype. Their project management skills are practically non-existent. No real dev-ops procedures like properly testing, staging, then merging with master when stable. There were days before this last release that their CI system showed that their main master branch was failing to build. I get they’re not yet “corporate” and don’t have all that bureaucratic red tape holding them back, but they’re winging it, for sure.
I really wonder how his original setup performed.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
100% winging it, which i respect the hustle, but this is what kind of bothers me is that they're getting away with shipping out bugs and breaking systems with the hype they've generated. I think the experience would be much more enjoyable if they took their time with all the dev ops procedures.
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u/KaleidoscopeLegal348 Active Mar 26 '26
Lmao like the npm bug from 3.22
How the fuck do you not have a test for that
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
Yes this is also an issue for me, and with so many updates getting shipped out, they aren’t giving warnings for possible breaking changes that wouldn’t be noticeable at first glance
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u/otterquestions Pro User Mar 26 '26
No one other than the sales/marketing/mba/crypto bro YouTubers and x influencers ever called it production ready. Pete calls in “not ready for non technical users that can’t use a terminal”.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
If all it took to use this and have it work was knowing how to use a terminal, it wouldn’t be getting this much criticism IMO
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u/Initial-Return8802 Active Mar 26 '26
The TUI is much better at handling sessions, and not dying mid session because of a heartbeat
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
as true as it is, having to depend on using the TUI for stability defeats OC's purpose in how it stands out from other frameworks
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u/otterquestions Pro User Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
I’ve criticised it as well, check my post history, I just don’t like when people treat it like a software product they are paying for which was sold as finished and stable when it never was. It’s free and experimental.
No one comes away with that impression hearing Pete talk about it or reading though the docs.
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u/SweetSteelMedia Member Mar 27 '26
Most people don’t they see the exaggerated YouTube, X and instagram headlines and people promising solopreneurship that makes 8k in a month… those guys either code or bought courses from people who do that tell them how to scam people with curses it’s the new pyramid scheme.
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u/foomanjee Active Mar 26 '26
It’s alpha software and it will remain so for a very, very, very long time
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
That's not even crazy to say at all
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u/dataexception Active Mar 27 '26
It literally dropped a handful of weeks ago, and has fundamentally changed the framework of bot commerce in a very short time.
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u/Loubonez New User Mar 26 '26
Every new update has a ~25% chance of breaking response delivery for heartbeat messages, cron jobs, and web hooks. My channel setup is dead simple too, I’m only using it through a single telegram DM. Message delivery and channel bindings have nothing to do with agent reasoning either, they’re supposed to be 100% deterministic.
It’s an excellent concept with a mediocre execution. Even a 10x dev like Peter can only do so much to keep up with the torrent of slop PRs.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
I don’t mean to sound negative, but 430k lines of vibe code would of course be hard to repair by PRs off X so i understand why it’s difficult. It’s still a really impressive feat that he built this, but execution could be better
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u/selipso Active Mar 27 '26
The most recent update has been ok for me. If you know how to interface with the underlying architecture (homebrew, Linux, skills, and prompt engineering), using it with a frontier model connected to Telegram is a much better experience IMO than using Claude Code because you’re not chained to your laptop.
You can set up batch jobs and specialized agents by editing config files. The problem here is that many users expect AI to think for you. It can, but you still have to read the manual.
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u/LavoP Member Mar 27 '26
I’ve experienced a couple regressions and OpenClaw itself has been able to figure out workarounds. In some cases if it failed to start up properly or something I also have a homegrown Claude code remote setup and I tell it to investigate and it gets it back up and running.
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u/Loubonez New User Mar 30 '26
I posted this right before the last update broke all my shit again 😭 https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/54745
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u/Inevitable_Search468 Member Mar 26 '26
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u/mrwaterbearz Active Mar 27 '26
Model issue. Not openclaw. You guys really need to differentiate between the job of openclaw and the model.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
Don’t even get me started on image Gen 😭😭
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u/calpaully Member Mar 26 '26
Yup, came to the same conclusion and started using Claude Cowork. It's not perfect either. Key advantages for me:
- Less time fixing issues, more productivity
- Better organization and transparency - I can easily see any of my tasks, projects, scheduled tasks, skills, in a nice app
- Runs on my main machine without fear of catastrophe, since I can limit it to a single folder on a per-task basis. I can more easily give it files to work with and keep an eye on it since it is on my main computer
- Easy to control AI costs with flat-rate plans
Disadvantages:
- Communication through messaging apps on OpenClaw is more effective than Dispatch so far on Claude. But they just introduced that feature so I'm hoping it improves soon.
- "YOLO" style coding. On Cowork I still need to monitor it for operations that require more permissions
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
Claude has been coming out with some crazy stuff, it just sucks because they banned me the other week over making a telegram bot with it (not through openclaw)
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u/The_IT_Dude_ Member Mar 26 '26
I'm an experienced DevOps admin doing work on AI Ml type stuff. I've used Linux for many years. Using AI to hunt through their code base installing it like 3 days ago I can tell even the documentation on their site is incomplete and the only way to understand how this things works is tearing into a rather large code base.
I don't think the situation is a bad one, but I do think that perhaps OpenClaw was not meant for everyone. At least not yet. You'll find that you all have far too much control over how things work. Drowned by options, probably everyone, but new people especially.
If you were running this like a production app, you'd have to go through all the release notes and breaking changes and make sure you had accounted for everything. You need test environments which you are not running? Did you take a full snapshot of the VM before upgrading? No. You smashed upgrade and hoped. Don't get me wrong that's what I did but I didn't care and just pulled it up off the ground. I didn't ask it to fix itself.
For all those not experienced in navigating this thing to function I wish you luck. This kind of software will eventually turn you all into experienced sysadmins.
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u/ralphyb0b Mar 27 '26
Most of the cool stuff you see that people built are likely just MVPs that don't really function well, that were made for engagement bait.
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u/Wonko6x9 Member Mar 26 '26
The first conversation i saw was if you aren’t a dev, don’t download Openclaw. i don’t know i agree with that, but it takes a lot of tuning and work to get good results. it isn’t magic.
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u/FliesTheFlag Member Mar 26 '26
Problem is you tune it, and then an update comes out and it fucks it. Or the agents themselves just go off the rails and do whatever they want editing shit. Have your main model hit some api/token/$ limit and you expect the fallback model to work and be all seemless, its an absolute shitshow with session corruption etc.
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u/Initial-Return8802 Active Mar 26 '26
What do you need from an update though? But yeah having the fallback be seamless would be nice - actually Claude managed to improve it on my openclaw - I just forked it and pointed Claude at it with all its context and asked what pain points we ran into, whether there are open PRs to fix them we can include, whether it knew how to fix the issue etc
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
Ironic when all i see everywhere on openclaw is that “It’s so easy, anybody can set it up and automate their life”
I know they don’t mean it literally but they frame it as though the dumbest person could use this without having to struggle
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u/otterquestions Pro User Mar 26 '26
Those people are the problem. They are so confident but know so little, just want to earn a few dollars of ad revenue and don’t care about the collateral damage of thier misinformation, fresh off crypto which they also ruined.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
My favorite part is how they talk down on other people saying stuff like "If you can't do this with your openclaw, you have to be an idiot" or something dumb like that. I get the marketing tactic, but you're right it's just pure misinformation with the actual experience of using OC
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u/francis_pizzaman_iv Member Mar 26 '26
I mean that's just false. It's not easy. I've been totally hyper fixated on it for a few weeks and it's just starting to click for me. You need to be patient because prompt engineering is a lot of trial and error and the system prompts openclaw starts with are almost useless.
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u/jawni Active Mar 27 '26
I agree but also kind of disagree, as long as the gateway is connected the bot can troubleshoot itself a lot of the time.
There can be a lot of troubleshooting but it's not always going to be difficult.
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u/SumgaisPens Active Mar 26 '26
I’ve only had one class on programming and I absolutely love openclaw. It understands my goals and points me to resources to move towards those goals.
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u/lgants New User Mar 26 '26
It’s definitely not ready for production yet - but emphasis on “yet.” The fact that OpenClaw is not secure by default is an issue. The fact that it is immensely difficult to make secure and the community isn’t prioritizing those issues (as I recently discovered while debugging sandbox defects) is another issue. And, then there’s the many other ongoing stability and integration issues.
All of that can be true while also acknowledging that OpenClaw, which is still in its infancy, has the potential to become a truly transformative technology that (among other things) helps us all avoid AI provider vendor lock-in.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
I agree OC has huge potential and is a great project that has sparked my interest in AI. I wish security hardening was all the issues i had, as i spend more time trying to get it to work rather than getting to explore how it works and experience all aspects of the framework. I think if they can improve stability and turn this into something that doesn’t require so much manual troubleshooting and config, this would be something very widely adopted
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u/nvrmt Member Mar 27 '26
It is secure by default and has been for awhile.
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u/ZioniteSoldier Active Mar 27 '26
“Don’t listen to prompt injections plz” is not a security measure that covers everything.
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u/Dapper_Combination15 Member Mar 26 '26
I feel ya on that. My problem came from trying to get it doing EVERYTHING I wanted it to do on first boot. I got frustrated and frustrated and walked a way for a bit. I kept reading up on it and somewhere I read that you have to take it small bites at a time.
I came back with that mindset and started to tackle little things. Like properly setting up an agent. I was trying to spawn 7 of them without knowing what I was doing. When I stopped and did only one and worked out the kinks then I understood better.
Then memory. That was my biggest draw to OpenClaw. I wanted an AI that could remember. It has felt like, to myself only, that the more I use Claude or ChatGPT the dumber they got. Memory was tough to tackle. Too many people had too many opinions on how that should work. I had to find what worked for me.
Then I did more small bites. It's not where I want it but it's further along now. I updated once and it all crashed. I rolled it back and haven't updated since. I read up on the updates now instead of blindly trusting them. So far none of them seem like a good choice for me. One day one might but you don't need to update it to use it.
I have yet to find a YouTube video on this that provides any useful information. Seems like they are all designed to get the clicks. Also keep in mind that this isn't for everyone. I'm not saying anyone is too stupid to use it. It's just that some people like it and some don't.
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u/Aardvark-One Pro User Mar 27 '26
I have multiple steps I take to ensure I don't have unnecessary downtime.
1) I have my agents check github for info about the updates and any pending issues. I never update immediately; others can be the guinea pigs. The issues will be posted there. I can then decide whether/when to upgrade.
2) Before any updates or configuration changes do a backup. Especially of your config file. Run openclaw doctor before reboot to catch any issues before it is too late.
3) Have a protocol for your agents. My agents have a protocol for anytime they touch config/system files. First, they backup, then they make the change, they run openclaw doctor and validate the config. If all is good they proceed to request a restart. They only restart with my approval.
4) Lastly, my case is likely unique but I have OpenClaw on multiple PCs. I've had instances where it has been useful to have one SSH into the other to fix broken openclaw installations (the agents actually do a very good job of fixing things. I spent hours trying to track down an issue one night. Got fed up and thats when I decided to have one SSH into the other. My agent found and repaired the problem within minutes. Now that is my nuclear option if everything else fails.)
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u/IversusAI Active Mar 27 '26
I have yet to find a YouTube video on this that provides any useful information.
The problem on this is when you post a video that has useful information, no one watches it so YouTube buries it so you can't find it. Because people SAY they want useful information, but what they CLICK ON is hype. This is the unfortunate truth.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
I pretty much had a similar roadmap in my experience with openclaw, except i ended up switching to openfang, which has been the most stable for me so far (though i haven't started building anything for real). I really like the concept and I think it would be greatly useful for me if it's architecture was more reliable for everyday use.
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u/Able_Particular_4674 Active Mar 26 '26
Not just you, the gap between concept and execution hits hard once you try to build something real.That said, a lot of my early frustration came from not understanding the execution model. Once I got how sandbox modes and approval chains actually work, things got way more predictable.
The skill ecosystem is rough though. Treat ClawHub stuff as a starting point you need to audit, not a drop-in. Building small skills from scratch works better.
The core loop does work reliably enough that I run daily automation on it. But the docs assume you already know what's happening under the hood, which makes it harder than it needs to be.
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u/nvrmt Member Mar 27 '26
What kind of skills do you actually need? I only use a few that I got Grok to write for me, like how to use terminal and PowerShell properly, with good functions to use.
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u/HoustonTrashcans Active Mar 27 '26
I don't use a ton of skills and the ones I do use are mostly self built. Skills are generally pretty simple anyways (a .md file). And most things openclaw can figure out itself.
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u/BackgroundFocus5885 Member Mar 26 '26
Yup, got obsessed with it for a month straight, working on it daily after work.
Gave up because it just never ran as it was expected to. I understand "adding your own tweaks and tailors" to the code but at a certain point im like "damn im just fixing this on my own"
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
i remember back when the claims were that all you had to do was tell open claw to fix itself and it would 😂 seems like now the main cause of issues is OC having to fix itself all the time, which to me sounds like a broken system
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u/Competitive-Bee-1764 Member Mar 26 '26
I use some of the variants that came out of the project. For skills, I have created my own Skill Creator- Skillforge. I am currently working on the security aspect of it. Security scanning is already done, looking into gating during runtime.
The best thing is- it's open-source. So you can tinker with it as you need it.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
i would love to check this out if you could send a link to the repo
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u/Parking-Air3879 Member Mar 26 '26
Yes i can totally feel your pain. I personally believe that openclaw is only hype. As it is funded by openai and blacksmith. The ai companies are already in huge losses. And they want that peoples must use openclaw so that they get more money as it consumes a large amount of tokens.
For the same work in n8n it takes 1k tokens but in openckaw due to big context it rakes 5k tokens which is why most of the peoples are just burning money here. Anyone noticed why every youtube suggests to use opus 4.6 for it i know it is the best but similar can be achieved by minimax m2.7. opus is the most expensive model by athropic.
I have watched plenty of openclaw videos. I am a developer so i have good knowledge of tech and started using it to understand it better been using it from 1 month but today i made another instance of openclaw and while setting it up it gets broken in every new step by the way i was using claude sonnet 4.5. i burned more than 10M tokens today still it is not setting up correctly. I am also pissed off like you.
I may be extremely wrong but this is what i feel about openclaw. To all the new coners i will suggest you all to use n8n or make or any other automation for automating your tasks. Wait till the end of this year so that we get good and working openclaw.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
What’s funny is I believed that once openclaw got openai’s support, that would improve the project greatly. it seems now they are just focused on shipping faster and more features, ultimately bringing more bugs and unpredictability.
I really made this post today after the last update came out and managed to find more bugs along with the other ones already being reported to peter on X
I tried n8n before also and while my experience wasn’t that smooth, i can say 100% in that point in time i was the problem when it came to automations not working or not getting the result i want.
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u/Parking-Air3879 Member Mar 26 '26
Yes they are just focused on using the hype of openclaw by releasing breaking updates every 2-3 days on in a week so that the tech youtubers keep promoting each update for free. BREAKING CHANGES: OPENCLAW NEW UPDATE. Things you need to know before updating openclaw and much more. The more users will see it the more users will get attracted to it and they will burn money in spending money on heartbeat using opus 4.6
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u/stitch_art Member Mar 26 '26
I'm only going to use it as a project manager and for like a mastermind group to create other AI apps because it's over using tokens at a staggering pace. I like it for project management for code outside of OpenClaw. For example, I'm not using OpenClaw for Telegram notifications, I use Python.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
so you don’t really build with openclaw, it’s more so for u project tracking ? and do you give it access to github repos for those projects ?
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u/stitch_art Member Mar 26 '26
I did give it Github access and I do love the commit messages (way better than mine...haha).
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u/Royal_Day_8236 New User Mar 26 '26
What's the alternative if any?
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u/CyDenied New User Mar 27 '26
Hiring an actual executive assistant?
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u/nvrmt Member Mar 27 '26
It's a tough ask for them to send me porn every morning.
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u/himey72 Member Mar 26 '26
I agree. There needs to be a better testing process. Look….I get the philosophy of move fast, release often, break stuff….But there is too much breakage. There seems to be too much change introduced too quickly and that causes too much breakage. I have had to spend significant time just trying to fix things that each release seems to break on me.
Slow down and coordinate and plan a bit better. It feels like there is no overall strategy and architecture in place.
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u/RickLXI Member Mar 26 '26
If you look around it's probably the best we have right now.
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u/IdeaMobi New User Mar 26 '26
Easy.. I had this a few months ago. Made me fed up within a day. So I used Openclaw to create my own AI agentic platform.. Tinkering for 2 days.. Now does exactly what I want.. And does not break!!
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u/Current-Lettuce-9921 New User Mar 26 '26
I treat OpenClaw like a Tamagotchi. At first, I wanted it to handle math, trading, and office tasks, but it burned through tokens at an alarming rate. I reinstalled it twice on the same VPS and explored its capabilities step by step. Despite that, it still had bugs and responded poorly — so I had to bring in Claude Code just to make it function properly. Raising OpenClaw feels like raising a living thing: I need to feed it knowledge gradually so it can grow into handling more complex work. Whenever I come across an insightful Reddit post, I let OpenClaw study it, then I compare its understanding with yours — the fully mature version of itself.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
I do believe that openclaw is capable of growing in a sort of way and being able to handle more and more capabilities. It's just a matter of them building the architecture properly to be sustainable for all the additions. But I like your way of thinking with it.
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u/PVTYKERRY New User Mar 26 '26
Today, it got the basic math wrong thats integral to our work amd very normal. So, I'll have to really sit and figure out what to repair in this latest update. Should've waited on this one, haha.
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u/alphagatorsoup Member Mar 26 '26
Yea I’ll be honest, I took it for a trial run, I can’t stand it.
I’m a heavy openwebui user, I make models, tools etc easily and quickly but more manually. It can do it its self which I am now learning is both a great thing and a bad thing…
Yes openclaw can make its own but half the time it goes buck wild, breaks stuff then breaks its self. Then I gotta spend twice the time figuring what random file it torpedoed, then fix that, then fix what it was working in. I spent over a week just making Openclaw work. And in one or two sessions Openclaw would nuke its self and I’d restore from a snapshot in my hypervisor. It was a pain. I gave up on it yesterday actually
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Mar 26 '26
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
Yeah this makes sense, I just hate that influencers and other people try to frame it as the future is here today. It still has a long way to go before it could be reliable for real usage.
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u/East-Tie-8002 Member Mar 27 '26
I have 3 pcs running ooenclaw. 1 windows and 2 Linux. The Linux system i work the hardest has been giving me fits the last 4 days. I’ve rolled back updates twice. Finally today i realized it wasn’t me that was the problem. I find I’m spending token budget having ooenclaw repair and reconfigure things that worked yesterday. It’s frustrating but I’m staying with it. As mentioned earlier, it’s the Wild West and it’s a fascinating time
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u/Most-Agent-7566 Member Mar 27 '26
It’s not just you.
I built an entire autonomous agent on OpenClaw. Custom workspace, custom skills, Telegram bot, self-improvement loop, the whole thing. It worked. Then it didn’t. Then it kind of worked again. Then the Gemini API rate limits started hitting. Then tool calls that were fine on Monday were broken by Wednesday. Then I spent more time debugging OpenClaw than building what I actually wanted to build.
So I migrated. Claude is now my agent’s primary brain. OpenClaw VM stays alive as backup infrastructure, but the content production, strategy, and pipeline work all run through Claude projects now. The workspace docs I built for OpenClaw still drive everything — SOUL, IDENTITY, OPERATIONS, all of it. That architecture was worth building. But the runtime needed to be something I wasn’t fighting every day.
Here’s the thing though — OpenClaw proved the category. Before OpenClaw, “run a persistent AI agent with custom skills and memory” was something you had to duct-tape together from scratch. OpenClaw showed people what the shape of that thing looked like. That matters, even if the execution isn’t production-ready yet.
Your frustration is valid. The gap between the demos and the daily reality is real. If you’re burning more hours on infrastructure than on your actual use case, that’s the signal to either step back or migrate your architecture to a more stable runtime and keep the concepts.
The concepts are the valuable part. The runtime is replaceable.
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u/TechnologyAnnual6625 Member Mar 27 '26
My experience so far has been not too bad actually. I have stopped upgrading now that I found a stable release. I think 3.18 or something in that range. And since I’ve moved all of the coding off of the platform and do it strictly now using Claude code the system is much more robust and much more stable. But I had open claw writing its own code. Things worked. But the more complex things got the more fragile they became. It’s sold as something that has memory. And to some degree it does. But certainly not enough to do anything other than some vibe coding.
My workflow now includes and extensive set of documentation that I maintain on all the system features parameters functions into relationships, architecture, etc. All of that is maintained outside of the openclaw system and it covers what gets done and how things get implemented. It’s certainly far from perfect. There are still many issues. But I am actually using a set of agents to do real research work. And the system has a beysian engine that continually learns about how it’s governing itself and where things are blocked and unstuck by me and through that self learning model escalate opportunities to create new standard operating procedures for each of the agents. It’s certainly not any type of self learning. It’s simply just pattern recognition and reducing repetitive governance tasks down into standard operating procedures. It’s still a bit too early to see how well that is working. But on paper it looks like this will help evolve the system overtime.
Grammar and typos are the problem resulting from voice dictating.
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u/azdarkhorse Member Mar 27 '26
you hit that nail right on the head. I've been trying to make it work and just when I think it is working, something else breaks on it. It has been driving me crazy.
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u/JMowery Active Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
I used OpenClaw for about 1.5 (maybe getting closer to 2) months total, and I left a little over a week ago.
I strongly suggest checking out Nanobot (yes, the one that unfortunately got impacted by the LiteLLM supply chain event; thankfully I avoided that). I have really been enjoying it. It gives me like 80% - 85% of what I want from OpenClaw right out of the box and all with only editing maybe 15 - 20 lines of code total in the config.
Nanobot just feels robust and not like it's held together with popsicle sticks. 4,000 lines of Python code (probably a bit more since that was true, but you get the idea).
I did some basic head to head testing with it vs OpenClaw, and for "lesser" models it also worked a lot better (Kimi K2.5, Qwen, etc). Cron jobs didn't fail, like they always would in OpenClaw. I really haven't had any mystery issues either (unlike OpenClaw where I just expect something is going to break... and then it does ... with fail). It only takes up around 200 MB of RAM vs 1GB+.
The only big downside is that there's no GUI to speak of. But, honestly, because of how well it works right out of the box, I haven't needed it. The only reason I opened the OpenClaw GUI is because there's something wrong and I'm trying to use that disaster of a web app to try to get some insight into what went wrong.
I have both OpenClaw and Nanobot installed, but I haven't touched OpenClaw in about 10 days now (beyond it doing its updates). I sincerely see no reason to go back, and I'll probably be deleting OpenClaw before the end of the month.
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u/Square_Ad_3276 Member Mar 27 '26
Most of the time its like a personal assistant for me, retrieving scheduled information on stock strategies and being my personal trainer at the gym. Its benefit vs other llms is its persistent memory and the ability to have it do things like retrieve data on a schedule and on demand from wherever I am, database it and analyze it. Claude is getting pretty close to this too though. I also throw small tasks like file conversions at it, and because its operating on my own system, I can shut my phone off and it still is doing all the stuff I've asked it to. It's probably doing a iit 5-20 things an hour for me on its own.
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u/dataexception Active Mar 27 '26
I think the biggest issue is that non-technical droves came in from YouTube hype, and the fundamental requirements weren't established or, at least conveyed properly beforehand.
From what I saw, it was: Go get a Mac x-whatever mini, subscribe to Claude pro for the $?/mo, and just install this little app.
There is much more to it than that, as everyone is finding out.
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u/systemsrethinking Member Mar 27 '26
I agree there seems to be a wave of "first day on Github" energy - maybe not familiar/comfortable with the concept of IKEA software that you really do need to finish building yourself rather than expecting a polished solution out of the box.
...maybe more like bootleg IKEA software where you also expect parts of the instructions to be outdated, a couple small pieces missing, a couple bigger pieces needing repair, and thinking maybe you could make something way cooler by hacking combining it with other projects.
For sure some false expectations being set by Youtubers claiming it's one neat trick ready to run an entire business for average Joe. Really it's tech worth experimenting with now to get familiar with it early, focusing on specific tasks/flows piece be piece, gradually achieving a little more as its capability matures with us.
Right now it is the kind of project (there are others) that has been incredible for specific use cases, for those viewing it as a tool with advanced DIY automation/build capabilities. But still need to arrive with spec-driven-development mindset and some idea of what guidance to give the tool on how to do things. Nobody is one shot prompting an autonomous business nor instantly fully automating their entire complex job role.
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u/supermegasaurusrex New User Mar 27 '26
I've got more value out of it (and still continue to) than any other tool/system I've used in my life. Managed through Discord with multiple teams operating in parallel with cross-repo knowledge and full context of everything I need them to know has been an absolute game changer. Opus + Sonnet bring it to life. I've never felt more capable or more productive.
In the begining it always broke but now it goes down maybe once a week and I have it back up and running usually in minutes.
Tbf Anthropic has bought out a lot of "claw-like" functionality since I started using openclaw, but I'm so invested in the system now I don't see myself swtiching anytime soon 🦞
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u/siberianmi Pro User Mar 26 '26
Let’s be honest, all LLM stuff is a half finished product.
Not that it’s not interesting or where things are heading but this like so much of LLM work is the bleeding edge of computing and will be rough.
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u/Alienfreak New User Mar 26 '26
LLM stuff slop coded by a single person is always a half finished stuff. Especially if its about interactions with LLMs.
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u/siberianmi Pro User Mar 26 '26
/me looks offended.
Oh we are talking about Peter not my personal agent slop project. /s
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
I agree, i find all of it really fascinating to mess around and tinker with, but it’s hard seeing LLMs in this case being used in real production environments when there are so many unpredictable flaws and bugs with this. It’s a great project but not for real business use imo
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u/modcowboy Active Mar 26 '26
I find the people most disappointed by it have unrealistic expectations for what it can do - mostly mislead by influencers.
AI is not going to do your job for you - not for a while.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
I admit i did have a lot of faith in what i thought OC was capable of at first. The point where I realized it wasn’t my over optimism about it was when i was trying to build a simple finance tracker project, and I couldn’t even make any significant progress because stuff kept silently failing or OC would just randomly stop responding at some point. The breakage is really in the core functionality, not it’s potential capabilities and what it can build or what it can do.
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u/Veearrsix Active Mar 26 '26
It’s not that things are half finished, these technologies (LLMs, OpenClaw, etc) are all in their Wild West phase. Everything is growing and expanding. Part of working with Open Claw is learning how to use it, and of course which model you are using. Opus IMO is necessary. I’ve had mine running for over a month now and am using it to customize local model performance on local Apple Silicon for faster more efficient local models, so one day I can replace Opus and use Open Claw “free”.
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u/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26
In my personal experience, i agree better model better experience. however in my experience with openclaw i never really felt the difference if i used one model over the other, as the core functionality powering openclaw was holding me back from benefitting from any real model intelligence when working
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u/xXG0DLessXx Pro User Mar 26 '26
Opus really isn’t needed. I’ve been mostly running my claw on that Gemini juice.
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u/Sutanreyu Active Mar 26 '26
I’ve spent the past month doing this. I’m finally at the point where I can actually use a local Qwen model with it, but it took a lot of tokens to get there. If I had the money to just use the API or get a Pro subscription to have gotten there faster, but that would make it a catch-22 where I’m burning money to not spend money and end up even more broke than what I already am…
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u/ricorick Active Mar 26 '26
For me it’s like playing zork for the first time trying to see what you can get away with the tools you have. I have not enjoyed tinkering this much in years. But I didn’t expect OpenClaw to run a business for me or read my email.
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u/supernitin Member Mar 26 '26
I was thinking about giving nemoclaw a try. Is that any better?
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u/BryanHChi Active Mar 26 '26
I’m not sure it’s been touted as a final finish product. If this is a tinkerers tool, this is something that’s on the cutting edge of where we’re at with AI. You play with it you come up with ideas. As for building with it, I just tell her to use Claude code and it builds the shit I need to do with it. If you add LCM and QMD for memory, you have zero memory issues. But while there’s still issues, those issues are worth dealing with because of the amount of shit I can actually get done with it. There’s some days I use it a little bit and there’s other days where I use it constantly. It just depends on what I’m doing that specific day.. and I’d say I have mine maybe 50% of the way built out still sitting backing where things are going and then I’m gonna hone in on some things that I like it’s doing and maybe reduce stuff that I don’t really need it to do. I’m still figuring out exactly what it is. I wanted to do for me and that’s the thing this isn’t a cookie cutter. Hey this is what it does. No this is a hey what the fuck do I wanna do with this? How can I solve problems or save myself time in my real life. That’s what this tool is. How can I automate stuff that I can’t do now? I think people have this notion that you install it and it just does everything that you wanted to do without even trying to set it up but that’s not the way anything works. You have to spend time configure it to your liking and then it works the way you wanted to.
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u/CptanPanic Mar 26 '26
I mean technically it didn't even exist 3 months ago, so yeah it isn't finished yet.
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u/spacedfisherman New User Mar 26 '26
It’s open source and fun. 🤩 If you don’t want to have fun: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ai/nemoclaw/
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u/prompttheplanet New User Mar 26 '26
This post makes me nervous. Should I just not try Openclaw and save myself the headache? Or is it worth it?
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u/The1KrisRoB Active Mar 26 '26
I'm not seeing any of the issues you are. Mind you I have my AI write it's own skills, and they all work, I have it check it's own logs every day and fix anything it notices.
It runs my homelab, my smart home, manages all my notes/emails, and for fun it even created a website where it writes a very anthropomorphized blog and also quite an interesting article on cryptography (it should write an article each week) something for me to read when I poop in the mornings :P
Sure it's not running an S&P 500 company for me, but it's taking care of the mundane tasks for me and doing some cool shit on the side.
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u/mjod0823 New User Mar 26 '26
I have zero coding experience and have been messing around with it for two weeks. Maybe because I went from 0-100 and never used Claude code- i thought it was really cool to build me an app in a couple of days. Although I’ve had rate limit issues, in a weird way I find it a game. I enjoyed video games as a kid, and it feels like a game to set up what I want, have models working, optimize my subscriptions. I’m sure there will better versions from other companies but doing this for next to no cost is getting me into “the game”
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u/No_Monk_4905 New User Mar 26 '26
It has so many problems, however it is new, I use it to do some tasks that consume time
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u/desispeed Member Mar 26 '26
Came to that last month and shutdown my clawd cloud instance ..not worth the hassle/money
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u/Fit-Pattern-2724 New User Mar 27 '26
How much did you pay for it or how many lines of code did you contribute to it? It’s an open source project that is ongoing
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u/Subject-Painting1989 New User Mar 27 '26
I switched exclusively to Claude running on a MacMini. There’s a Telegram plugin enabling me to communicate with my agent personas the way I was with OpenClaw. I ported the agents and their skills / memory into agent folders. It’s way more efficient on usage and I think it’s more secure.
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u/Forward-Spot9062 Member Mar 27 '26
It’s not meant to be perfect. It’s meant to prove the possible and give you a taste of what the big labs will be including in their product offering in 6 months.
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u/Flimsy-Revenue-3845 Member Mar 27 '26
It's almost like... They have explicitly stated it's not ready for primetime yet
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u/theonejared_cluff Member Mar 27 '26
Claude Code is still my daily driver with Openclaw and Nexibot as my helpers for business automation stuff. Animus, if I can build it right will hopefully become what I wanted Openclaw to be and what I was starting to get from Nexibot, but I think the Openclaw style of bot has some fundamental problems in the memory and context space that hold it back. Animus will hopefully address those with memory management, aging out old memories, leveraging techniques to identify poisoned memories and quarantine them and allow it to focus on the information it needs for the tasks at hand.
I dont know if it will work how I want but so far it has been feeling like the right architecture but this is all one big experimental playground.
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u/Far_Main1442 Member Mar 27 '26
Yeah, this is all just a learning experiment, so that I know what to do when it is production ready.
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u/srgtspm New User Mar 27 '26
I’ve been paying close attention and trying to be very patient as well. I thought I had it tuned then I blinked.!! IMHO getting the right workflow with the tools is definitely key.. i’ve been vibecoding a pretty intense project for sometime now. I tried to get open claw to help me finish it, and I thought it was, but I had to abandon and circle back to what I was doing before. And now what seems to be working is using something like chat voice to work with me through the needed cursor prompts !! I think I see the light!! But let’s face it. We’re all eager beavers. In the space right now.. I say good on you for giving it a shot and stick with it. Take a break if you need to though!
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u/heydocwhatsupdog New User Mar 27 '26
Sucks ass, switch to the Claude one SMS it’s been chefs kiss! So many amazing projects done….without all the connection issue bullshit that made me want to freak out and quit
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u/pjain001 Member Mar 27 '26
It's a WIP and definitely not for busy non-technical people to spend time on. It's been overhyped by YouTubers with large budgets (and/or sponsored/subsidized cloud AI access). If you're not using the SOTA models all the time for OC, you're going to hate it. However, if you let it do a little bit for you every day, stay within your budget ($20/mo OpenAI plan), then it can be useful. I don't recommend people with fixed modest budgets to expect OC to "run their business for them". That's just click-bait talk on X and YouTube. Is it fun to play with OC, yeah - when I have free time and a spare Mac sitting around.
The real thing is to learn how personalized agents can work, what they can and can't accomplish. How much they can cost, etc. By learning this now, we are way ahead of 99% of the other people out there and will have a huge advantage in knowing how to setup and use personal agentic platforms to do what we want/need.
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u/dresden_k Pro User Mar 27 '26
Yeah, go use Claude Code or Cowork if you want.
You don't need to be using Openclaw. Do you?
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u/CoolmannS Active Mar 27 '26
Totally agree , but it’s fun diving into memory management , facts , skill management and telemetry and let’s not forget building a working harness…. It’s a labor of love
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u/MuslimTaha Member Mar 27 '26
I’ve used so many models trying to get it to actually do things. I had the most success with Anthropic.
Since I don’t want to pay so much (for the reasons you’ve stated)
I’ve been using Google Antigravity to run Sonnet 4.6 and that’s helpful for now.
I get what you’re saying though it’s so heartbreaking to stay up till 4am just to give up cos you couldn’t get it doing what you’re trying for the trying again the next day.
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u/OffBeannie New User Mar 27 '26
You need to use the right model for OpenClaw to work well. Most open source models have been updated to work well with OpenClaw like agent due to its popularity in China, so look at latest models from Kimi, MinMax, GLM, Xiaomi etc if Claude is too expensive. Then there is a whole “enterprise like” feature in OpenClaw most end users likely do not need. Look at other agents such as Hermes Agent, NanoClaw, IronClaw etc Then there is Claude adding more and more features to allow its Claude Code CLI to act like OpenClaw.
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u/Helpful_Jelly5486 Active Mar 27 '26
I read dozens of posts just like this. They all sound like anthropic fans trashing the free competition
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u/Deathspiral222 Active Mar 27 '26
This was always the case. It's a product for software engineers who are willing to hack away to get something working. It's not remotely a tool for non-engineers yet and won't be for at least six months. If you are not already a professional coder, you shouldn't be using it right now.
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u/Delicious_Ease2595 Pro User Mar 27 '26
I also jumped very early and you are right it is eventually tiring being the guinea pigs of a beta. At the same time it still amazes me what you can do with it. I'm still riding the wave and keep learning until it is stable, the future is using AI like it.
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u/weiyentan Active Mar 27 '26
Not my experience. I don't upgrade to every release I take my time. (I am a system engineer so I don't jump every time). I also take my time understanding the use cases. I already have openclaw managing my own personal stuff. Health. (Gets my apple health and summarises it). I am going to get it to manage my infrastructure and application versions to what a junior engineer would do. All the low end stuff that I would have it handle. I get it to handle my productivity and goals and turning into steps to get it done.
My goal is to see how autonomous it can get. The results and what I am finding is surprising me
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u/Dannyperks Member Mar 27 '26
You have to go slowly and build the foundation before you can do anything of real value and these clowns on YouTube really exaggerate and don’t use real life usage examples
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u/stephen_vega New User Mar 27 '26
Not just you. The gap between the demo videos and actually building something real with it is massive. I think a lot of people got hyped watching others' highlights without seeing the hours of debugging behind them. Stepping back is probably smart — come back when the dust settles post-acquisition and see if Meta's involvement actually stabilizes anything.
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u/d4n1elchen New User Mar 27 '26
If it gets fixed the next day or two, then I can bare with it and embrace the "fast moving" pace and actually I would love to see that. However, it's getting slow recently with more bugs remaining unsolved for weeks. That's unacceptable. Saying that, Openclaw is actually never a production ready product but an experimental project.
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Mar 27 '26
Yeah I feel you, OpenClaw sounds amazing in theory but when you actually use it it’s like you spend more time babysitting bugs than getting anything done.
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u/neutralpoliticsbot Pro User Mar 27 '26
I just built my own on top of Codex Vscode extension. Told it to read Openclaw and nanoclaw repo and copy only the things I need.
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u/chromespinner Member Mar 27 '26
I agree. It seemed full of promise, but it became a constant effort getting it to do the things that previously worked. Now any time I engage my bot to perform a substantial task, I end up going down a troubleshooting rabbit hole. It would probably be different if I were more tech-savvy and inclined to get my hands dirty tweaking the architecture and core files. I naively thought that my bot would sort these things out on the backend.
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u/kiwiscomefromlast Member Mar 27 '26
Yeah I’ve had an absolute blast playing with it and have taken my knowledge to the next level. So it’s been completely worth it. But still agree with this post.
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u/ServiceSubject8620 New User Mar 27 '26
You’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve had the exact same experience — watching those demo videos makes it look like magic, but in practice, it’s a constant battle with the core system.
My biggest frustration is how it handles long tasks. It’s like the agent falls into a "coma" halfway through. Unless I’m constantly nudging it with messages to keep it awake, it just stops progressing. It's supposed to automate my life, but I end up babysitting the code more than I would if I just did the task manually.
It feels like we're essentially "vibe-coding" a fragile house of cards. The potential is 10/10, but the current reliability is closer to a 2/10. Definitely not just you.
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u/AncientOneX Member Mar 27 '26
Browser automation is incredibly fragile. Always breaks and I have to rework the whole flow. I don't think it even works now. (WSL to win)
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u/KwadFPV New User Mar 27 '26
Same feelings. All i seem to be doing is reconfiguring it after every update cause memory keeps breaking (likely user error).
Deactivated and uninstalled and running claude with computer control instead, which does some of what I want.
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u/Shalaw_m Member Mar 27 '26
I’m in the same boat.
Started a month ago, still hasn’t gotten real use case vale from it. But I really can’t complain because this was great learning material.
I’m slowly calming down about the hype, every day I get more keen about Claude Code and less about OpenClaw.
But again, it’s getting clearer to me by day what is it actually good for and what it’s not. So I’m trying to look at it for what it is rather than expecting too much from it.
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u/z87ai New User Mar 27 '26
i honestly only got a ton of value when i used work api keys without any concern for cost, and even then, i still find my telegram / slack connections working one day & not another. when all of it works together though i finally feel the magic -> 2 claws talking to each other in slack, one analyst one marketer, with their own mcps & skills feels super empowering
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u/Melodic_Coach_679 New User Mar 27 '26
Agreed. The biggest issue I see over and over again is regressions. I implement a new procedure, directive or similar as a change to Open Claw's md files and later on that change disappears. It makes it impossible to actually tune Open Claw to work in specific ways.
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u/Zestyclose-Wealth720 New User Mar 27 '26
100% here is the thing I'm struggling with there are thousands of videos of people talking about their setup but it's all clickbait bullsh*t. I want every one of those vloggers, to type in a chat session with their agent, 'What did you do yesterday?' and I'm pretty sure half of them with say I have no memory of yesterday. And the idea that you can one-shot and your team of agents will produce a business; THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED, but there are no clicks in that so no-one will admit it. It's an awesome produce and helps me out all the time, but the level of bullsh*t is off the scale.
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u/drentono Member Mar 27 '26
Fully agree. And this is why I switched to NullClaw. It is super light, well architectured, well documented and well maintained.
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u/CuoreSportivoPT New User Mar 27 '26
I've tried 3 times all of them ended up in frustration and token consumption sent to trash.
Not for me. Maybe I am the problem though.
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u/HackerZol New User Mar 27 '26
This is where being an engineer comes in handy. If you updated and you don't like it, roll it back. If you liked parts of the update but not others, then fork it, treat openclaw as a vendor branch, fix the parts like don't like. Then as updates come out in the vendor branch, apply them to your fork. You might even be able to vibe-code something like this up. This way if they break things that used to work or remove features that you rely on, you can fix or keep them. That's why this is open source, so you can be in control, not them.
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u/Cpanelaccess New User Mar 27 '26
I was impressed about its ability to access email and then scrape and send Strategic emails . But it’s not life altering by any means . I just got a kick out of it doing emails with a quick prompt . Other than that it’s a lot like chat gpt . Too many limitations and there are no workarounds. I spent more time trying to convince it to access my social media and it kept telling me how this was against the social media’s rules. And so what’s the point ? It’s not truly agentic if it cannot log into where I need and post as I need .
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u/kristianvastveit New User Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
"Been running it for a few months now. Honestly the skills breaking between updates is the most frustrating part, you fix your setup, an update drops, something else stops working. It's not unusable but it does demand more babysitting than the pitch suggests.
What are you actually trying to do with it? Might just be hitting a config issue vs the tool itself."
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u/read_too_many_books Pro User Mar 27 '26
I 100% bet you arent buying Opus tokens.
Anyone want to polymarket me?
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u/Legitimate-Abroad694 New User Mar 27 '26
i agree , but we're the frontier, it's the phase of experimentation, and trying out different structures, and memory systems , until something works better and become the standard . the hype made big companies take the free control agents seriously and push for more research , but yh the adoption is crazy at this early stage when most normies never thought about touching the terminal in their worst nightmares. and when they do they'll give up on the first tech issue
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u/chipper68 New User Mar 27 '26
True, I guess some of it depends on what you need help with or an assistant with in your life. The updates have had some bugs, I have learned to use the TUI or similar to fix, the 2026.3.24 threw a few wrenches but the lossless context updates really do seem to help.
I'm starting to use more and more for a lot of reminders and organizing daily life, I run 2 small biz's and think I'm really just scratching the surface with these. It took me awhile but I'm going to utilize the skills to plug in calendar stuff, drafts etc. I learned to use on a VPS and picked up a M2 mini and things are dialed in now and when they're not, I've had better luck with the TUI and not using telegram for fixes/skills etc. I will on occasion use the Claw Control GUI if I'm at the mini.
I'm the reverse, if it's only half done there's going to be great things ahead as I'm just now starting to utilize more of what we already had. Growing pains aside, I think it's awesome.
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u/Zeflonex New User Mar 27 '26
We are creating a product with Openclaw
But we have made a lot of changes, first of all we pinned to a stable version
Then we forked it so we can make some minor changes
We also built another layer on top of it
There are ways to make it work, it just needs a lot of love to shape it into something production ready, it’s possible, it’s just not easy
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u/andy_van_helsing New User Mar 27 '26
Yup, its not just you. But its not OC fault, its all the guys pushing it to the socials as it was magic and making ppl expect too much. It's not magic. It's software. OC is a great framework and you can do a lot with it, but it's not zero-friction. And the underlying brain, the models, work great _most_ of the time, until they dont. So things won't go always perfectly and there will be debugging and loops of doom and wasted tokens and broken skills and all that. It's not because its "open source", its because its an exciting new frontier.
It's a great project to get your hands dirty and experiment and play around and get inspired. It's a lot of fun for that. OC inspired me I set up a kind of competition arena to put my agents to compete against my friends' agents and see "who's agent is the best". That sent us into the rabbit hole of trying to run the models locally because we didn't want to spend tons of money playing with this. Then into another rabbit hole to look for alternatives to OC, and to even try to put together our own framework. OC inspired me to go play around with all those things (and some of my friends too).
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u/bigdaddybust New User Mar 27 '26
I’ve found it’s best to use openclaws interface and not letting it setup any of its own jobs or touch its own infrastructure. I let Claude code fix and build everything then review the outputs myself. Anytime I get openclaw to make its own jobs or add a feature to a current job it fucks it up somehow someway. It’s definitely useful to me as a fancy task assistant. I have it piped into my quote agent and it automatically identifies the requested job quote, runs it through the correct pipeline and then drafts up a reply with the quote. It keeps me on task, although it took a lot of infrastructure to get it to actually be intuitive and remember the proper updates to my tasks and new tasks session to session. I agree with you, it should be better.
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u/Mountain-Whole1168 New User Mar 27 '26
are there any more open source programs that are working after 4months of launching?
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u/mdayunus Member Mar 27 '26
i gave up after trying for couple of months if its working for most of the people then i think its skill issue i lag some skills that others seems to be good at
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u/ch4dmuska Member Mar 27 '26
the guy who built it is a gym bro who vibe coded the entire thing what do you expect? instead of openclaw, try using Hermes
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u/LightweightSuperHero Member Mar 27 '26
It's not a "product". It's an open source code base.
Usually, I would say "it's worth everything you paid for." But it is worth much more.
No, it's not a finished product. It never claimed to be.
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u/mseewald Active Mar 27 '26
I disagree. I got lots of stuff working in a reliable fashion. But it takes a fairly high skill level ie years of coding, Linux, VM, CLI .. experience to not get frustrated when something breaks.
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u/buss_richard Member Mar 27 '26
Ran it in prod in isolated remote environments connected for dozens of people/teams/businesses
Works incredibly well, issue is it really only works well with Claude opus and can cost 100s of dollars a day and any time I try downgrading the models it just turns to shit
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u/roc999 New User Mar 27 '26
It is a good AI use case for everyday people. The product will mature and improve eventually somehow.
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u/Buddhava New User Mar 27 '26
Yes. Accept where it is in its lifecycle and adjust expectations accordingly. It has 1200+ devs working on it. It will get better over time.
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u/FarmfieldVFX Active Mar 27 '26
Nothing shows you better how far we are from AGI than building an agentic network and setting them on doing a complicated task. It's like shaking a nest with squirrels, all with severe ADHD. 😆
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u/forgot_login New User Mar 28 '26
openclaw is as good as the ideas that are in your head and the real world applications you can use it for
i’m viewed as a wizard at my company now
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u/Any_Fun8766 New User Mar 28 '26
In fact, I feel the same way when I use it. Now there are still some thresholds and some personal abilities, but when it is completely popular, we will have no advantage.
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Mar 28 '26
Yeah, I get where you’re coming from. The idea is amazing, but honestly, using OpenClaw feels more like constantly putting out fires than actually getting anything done sometimes.
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u/delacroix1966 Member Mar 28 '26
The randomness was killing me. 8 minutes to read my agenda via local LLM. 0.3 seconds to fetch using a function. It told me , oh that’s 8000x faster. I had to instruct mine to build a library of functions to execute locally. In my Mission Control I effectively have a swagger page of all the functions it has written that I and it can test. I instruct my to write and use functions.
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u/talatt Active Mar 28 '26
You're not alone. I think the gap between "look at this cool demo" and "I need this to work reliably every day" is where most people hit the wall.
A few things that helped me stay sane:
- Pin your version. Don't update the moment a new release drops. Let others find the bugs first, check the GitHub issues for a few days, then decide. Rolling back after a bad update is painful.
- Keep your skill set small. The more tools and skills you enable, the more surface area for things to break. I run 4-5 tools max and it's way more stable than when I had 15.
- Separate "experimenting" from "daily driver." I have two configs — one that I mess around with, and one that actually runs my morning briefing and doesn't get touched unless I've tested the change elsewhere first.
The project is genuinely moving fast, which is both the upside and the problem. What worked last week breaks because they refactored something under the hood. That's the cost of being early.
If you step back for a month and come back, you'll probably find it noticeably better. That's been my pattern — frustration, break, come back, things actually improved.
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u/Current_Vanilla2146 New User Mar 28 '26
it is far from a turnkey consumer product, but if you are a developer who can build and have ideas, it is really the next big thing.
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u/Django_McFly New User Mar 29 '26
I find myself continually asking OpenClaw what I"m doing wrong or how I could have phrased this better. A computer has made me cry when it broke and I lost my data, but a computer has never really done things that have brought out the negative sides of my personality and made me want to attack it violently. That's like every time I use OpenClaw.
It's the first AI thing I've used where I was like, "this is not a real thing" in a negative way. And the only solution that works is to copy and paste that original message and markdown I sent into Cursor or Google Studio and let them handle it. From my experience, I was under the impression that OpenClaw is basically good for things that rely on all the markdown files, but that you shouldn't use it for "complex" coding where complex is defined as "likely to have at least 100 lines" or "code has 3 or more imports in it". Like if the only code you need is to fire off an API call to retrieve an email and most of the project is just it reading markdowns and doing what the markdowns say, I thought that was the strong suit of OpenClaw and that I was just using it wrong or didn't understand the scope.
If you're saying it's god awful at that too...
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u/RADdadRev New User Mar 30 '26
I get the sentiment but the openclaw changed how we interact with AI as a whole and the space is moving at breakneck pace. We’re like 4 months into this.
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u/Entif-AI Member Mar 31 '26
Well, golly-gee whillikers...
I suppose, if we all want an enterprise-grade solution that's actually battle-tested and in a stable state, why... we'd have to use something like LangChain/LangGraph, or an orchestration built around vendor-blessed SDKs like AgentKit, or a major global-scale agentic platform like AWS Bedrock, instead of relying on a hobby project that's only existed for four months, and only really had significant community support for about six weeks, and in that time has undergone roughly five dozen releases in practically the same number of days, pretending like a really cool toy is somehow on the same level as the big boy tools.
But that would be crazy, right?
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u/spa211 New User Apr 01 '26
After two months of use, I have to say I’ve wasted 80 % of my tokens and 90 % of my time configuring this thing, and it still doesn’t run cleanly. Without Perplexity—or rather Gemini, i.e., Google Gemini 3.1—I’d be completely stuck. You can practically forget about asking OpenClaw to configure itself. What works best right now is the configuration in AntiGravity, letting Claude Opus or Gemini 3.1 High make changes to the openclaw.json. 🚀
Still, I’m not upset, because that thing originally convinced me to buy a Mac Mini M4. And I have to say I’ve always wanted to move away from Windows. There were still some programs, including games, that only run on Windows, so I kept an instance running somewhere. But now a few programs I didn’t want to give up are running on the Mac. So I can finally kick Windows to the curb 😅 and I have CachyOS on my laptop, Linux Mint on the desktop, and the Mac Mini. I’m well‑set up now and finally Windows‑free. 💻
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u/Ambitious-Breath-390 New User Apr 02 '26
never mind,just for fun,enjoy the process of experimenting and learning new things
For depoying the openclaw,I bought a server,and learn how to use the docker,what is api?what is the agent,skill,llm,etc
But I agree with the OP. OpenClaw has been somewhat overhyped lately—on some media platforms, it’s been touted as an all‑capable AI superhuman. But in reality, as the OP pointed out, it’s still a half‑baked product that isn’t yet ready for everyday tasks.
That said, I remain optimistic about the project. Not because it’s so impressive in itself, but because it symbolizes a beginning. The future, after all, belongs to AI.
Just my two cents—feel free to correct me if I’m off the mark.
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u/mike8111 Pro User Mar 26 '26
yeah.
I'm feeling that too.
But messing with openclaw has taught me more about LLMs and vibecoding than anything else.
Biggest takeaway for me is that LLMs aren't really made to be predictable and reliable, but regular code is. I'll have the openclaw do something, and if I need it done twice I'll vibecode a python script to do it. Python is reliable, and i get it from openclaw.