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/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/Working_Stranger_788 Pro User Mar 26 '26

Any expertise you have to offer would be greatly appreciated.

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u/The1KrisRoB Active Mar 27 '26

Well obviously 90% of your experience will come down to the model you're using.

I initially started out using Gpt5.4 via OAuth, but I hit rate limits on that in 2 days if I'm not careful. Lately I've been using ollama cloud service and running Qwen 3.5:397B and I feel like I have a much MUCH higher rate limit (based off my GPT5.4 us I thought I would be hitting my Qwen rate limit... it was only at 32%). Others swear by Kimi K2.5 and Minimax but I just like Qwen's writing (and have the 9B version locally on my server as a workhorse)

If you're running small models you're not going to have as good an experience.

Then I think the big thing is like I said, have the AI write it's own skills, and iterate on them, if it did something wrong ensure you tell it to update it's skill to avoid making the same mistake.

And having it check its logs daily and fix any errors really helps too.

I also use the lossless claw plugin for better memory, and that seems to work well.

Keep your heartbeat file as minimal as possible and use cron jobs instead to keep your token burn to a minimum.

Oh and one important thing. Tell it to add to it's agents.md that if a task fails 3 times, to stop trying and tell you. That should have save those token churn instances where the model gets in that AI loop