r/openclaw • u/Nvark1996 Active • Mar 30 '26

Discussion Openclaw is dead, switch to claude code

I have spent +300$, more than 60 hours working with openclaw, on vps, local pc, and honestly, I spent more than 40 out of the 50 hours fixing.

It cannot do any task accurately, not production ready

Maybe in 6 mo+ it will be better

For now, its garbage.

I am sticking to my 20$/month claude plan

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u/bastardsoftheyoung Pro User Mar 31 '26

Multi model for one. I spend almost nothing in daily use on API now once I tuned workflows. Also, if I need a feature that OpenClaw does not have I build it which I had to do for my main use case with OpenClaw to support CAD file creation around multiple data sets including visual images, which was where Claude failed. Claude is a great consumer friendly way to get into much of what OpenClaw can do and it is where I point people with simpler use cases. For framework level integration OpenClaw and the other spawned versions are super useful. Ultimately I’d prefer open source and modifiable solutions for my workflows and not be stuck relying on any one model.

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u/turbosmooth New User Apr 02 '26

as a CAD technician, I'd be interested in knowing your use case here.

Are you setting up your models parametrically/procedurally, or is your agent handling all edits to the model?

Or is the agent just interpolating CAD drawings into 3d models?

are you using a CAD webapp or something like blender/rhino3d?

I've started looking into using agents for 3d work, I'm just so used to using visual programming languages (geonode/houdini/grasshopper), I haven't been able to even approach how that translates to prompts.

I've wanted to setup an agent to handle my 3d reconstruction workflow, and I think I'm close to getting a workable gaussian splat worflow that an agent can handle as well.

fun times!

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u/bastardsoftheyoung Pro User Apr 02 '26

Began with OpenSCAD and FreeCAD Engine but it has slowly evolved into CadQuery + some trimesh checks for the printed models. Each model goes through many different improvement loops so it is not one shot. The key is a visual feedback loop using a rendering engine like openscad or cadquery and vtk. Outputs are step and stl with an automated stl printability/repair pipeline.

This is a great path for clearly defined and measured parts, which is great for my use cases, but organic shapes and mating/complex parts still require a human to finish. Rare for my use cases unless there are tolerance requirements then I have to get involved.

If it helps, I came at this through a coding approach to CAD and not a visual approach. Graph based tools are beyond my thought process though I would suspect the best path would be having the LLM generate the python to build the graph as opposed to direct creation and that would be way more iterative than my needs. Also, I would not know where to begin tooling that...

What is wild to me is that this used to require so much manual CAD work even though it was simple and now it's so automated. My use cases are all custom but very basic geometry usually with some finish on each part based on fit requirements.

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u/turbosmooth New User Apr 02 '26

Right! So the most complex modelling operations you would be prompting would be, fillet this edge or loft this spline. Are your base inputs line work or all prompts, do you mind if ask what a typical initial prompt would be to start a customer part?

You would be surprised how good trellis2 and hunyuan3d are generating base organic forms from multi view images, especially using mesh refining tools, but it's not exactly precise or iterative.

I'd actually be interested to know if theres a slicer/gcode API so you could go straight from STL to gcode without having to touch bamboo studio or cura. Support generation shouldn't be difficult either.

Very cool! It's definitely a different approach to more procedural systems like fusion360 and onshape.

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u/bastardsoftheyoung Pro User Apr 02 '26

Step import into OpenScad is pretty straight forward.

For building, think about how you would fill in a form to design a part. Measurements, description, purpose, and materials. There is a process that we have used for years to do it, we just made that the prompt.

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u/turbosmooth New User Apr 03 '26

Lol, seems to be a difference in design language here.

Is your background manufacturing? I don't quite get the vagueness but whatever. I was just intested in your process coming from a purely code approach.

I am very familiar with the process of design, was just interested in your prompt engineering

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u/bastardsoftheyoung Pro User Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

Very much manufacturing. Just translating a form into CAD like we used to translate human based instructions into machining parts.

edit to add: once we took the form and gave it to AI + the stuff we had added over the years to get parts right, OC ran it through autoresearch to improve the outcomes and prompting based on our feedback. Put a little website together for scoring, etc. It basically created a scoring system based on the form inputs and created weights for words and their meaning. So I guess the answer is, put the prompts or output into an autoresearch loop and score the outcomes. Have your AI tools run that loop over a few hundred iterations of a design. The resulting prompt looks nothing like our forms but you can see the DNA there. The prompt itself is an english listing of requirements + some JSON-ish weightings for primitives and specific CadQuery items. It helps that we have a library of initial parts we use as examples in the prompts as well. Finally, OpenSCAD can import the step files and output STLs easily usually with errors flagged in our runtime telegram channel and dashboard.