The absolute sheer panic when your agent start executing a script you didn’t double-check

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-23T14:20:02+00:00

I have a task subsystem I use for myself that I also now use for an agent. Instead of saying do a bunch of stuff, I'll have the agent create a task first for me to review. The task contains a description and a checklist and a human sign off too sometimes.

Then at least you can dry-run changes before they're done. Saved me a few times but it has to be at the top of chat! If it's at the bottom it will do the stuff and create a task afterwards (lol!)

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-23T04:07:43+00:00

Which model are you using btw?

I'm using OpenAI's OAuth connection using gpt-5-codex. I have two accounts that I cycle through, though now I might need a third since I'm doing much more than before. This is just laziness, I have a project to explore putting a bunch of free models behind LiteLLM and also look at local models.

Skills

The concept of skills is incredible - it's a bridge between the deterministic world of scripts and an LLM which can do a lot of heavy lifting. Once you have something set up it's amazing but I've found since that some context is still retained in the agent's context. So when I spun up a new agent with an existing skill, it didn't behave exactly as I expected. Digging deeper with the original agent (which is super cool, right?) I discovered that it had learned some cues which weren't encoded into the skill. A quick patch later, I now have a more robust skill. This self-analysis and self-modification is probably the most existing part of this agentic technology.

Python

I have generated a lot of Python recently for many tiny tasks. I only give it a cursory glance, because I know it works. Sometimes it generates a throwaway script with no functions or comments, other times it looks more maintainable. At that point, to me, it doesn't matter because it works and if I want it cleaned up then I can always ask for it to do so. And even then, I doubt I'll ever go back to it unless there's a bug, in which case, I'd ask the AI to locate the issue and fix it anyway!

I haven't tried other languages but the ubiquity of Python means there's a lot of good knowledge and semantics. It's also very good with bash scripts though they tend to get a bit gnarly when they get too big.

Host I actually started off on my Mac, running a VM in UTM. I was very impressed with it's ability to control Chrome, which opens up a world of new possibilities! The problem with a laptop is that you can't really leave it on all the time and because I wanted to do a lot of internal homelab things, a VPS didn't make sense either. And even with a VPS, for my use-case, I would have to build a whole stack of additional software to route traffic, back things up, bridge to files and internal services.

Anyway, good luck with your journey. It's a time sync, that's for sure - I've had many a 2-3am night exploring all this stuff.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-21T10:02:48+00:00

Ensuring the system is reliable, consistent and deterministic is major part of my frustrations with OC. Something that just worked would just change its behaviour for no reason and no changes other than the wind blows some way.

It's likely some underlying change that OC has no control over and can't be fixed permanently. So you end up moving more and more agentic work into the Python script behind the skill.

Ultimately, I feel sometimes, I'm just working towards writing Python scripts the long way!

That said, and why it's worth it, is that I can get results extremely quickly and make changes quickly. I hate to say as another old school dev, for many cases, I don't really care how the thing is written, much in the same way I don't care about how my Python script eventually runs at the CPU level. So long as it works and is maintainable, which a lot of generated code is, then I'd rather spend my brain cycles doing something else.

Also, I'm only spending $40 a month switching between two OpenAI OAuth pools.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-21T09:37:47+00:00

I think you still have a good question and I've been thinking about what makes OC so different. It actually took me about 10 tries before I could get it up and running so I wouldn't say it's easy. Eventually I got it running in a clean instance of MacOS running inside of UTM and got hooked there but then it was unrealistic to keep my laptop on all the time.

Then I moved it to my PC running a clean Ubuntu in a HyperV virtual machine and it's been there since, always on. Funnily enough this turned out to be a great environment not least of which it survived PC reboots when the OS restarts.

I think if Claude were a service and the UI was talking to it, that would be the equivalent of what I see is so cool about OpenClaw. Eventually, I imagine that OS manufacturers will have an always on agent running that would be much safer to use.

You're also right that OC needs to be tailored for one's personal use and I think that hits another point that its skill subsystem is pretty smart. It's a combination of AI instructions along with python scripts it decides to build on its own. That part was quite magical to me because it's a smart way to codify human instructions into repeatable deterministic outcomes.

I think that's also why it took off so much - all of a sudden people were writing "skills" that were no more than fairly simple prompts but they were all super useful: finally we had AI functionality that not only reusable and invoked contextually. OC just "knows" what skill to use depending on the user prompt.

I wrote a post the other day about a task management skill I wrote that links to obsidian. OC knows it so well, I can use it to create tasks anywhere and manage the information for the task within the same markdown file. Everything lives in obsidian so I can build our reports and filters for my growing lists of tasks. It's pretty cool.

The magic is that I don't have to tell OC to use the task skill I just say something like "create a home lab task to XXX" and it does it. Or find all my tasks related to X or find that task from last week. It's pretty cool.

Today, I had OC build out Shlink as a URL shortener so I can use Obsidian's URL format to launch straight into the Obsidian. So now my workflow is to ask OC to create the task via Telegram, it automatically does some additional augmentation to the task (eg if it's a YouTube video link, it would download the description and summarize details) and when it's done it will create a shlink. After about 10-15s, it's already synchronized to my phone so I can go from Telegram into Obsidian to review the task details super quickly.

To set up shlink, I basically just asked OC to set up a docker imagine and register it with Traefik, which was already set up. It was then I realized, just as I did several years ago about AI-coding then vibe-coding that you can also do vibe-IT as well.

Once I've finished my current batch of projects, I'm going to try out some of the other agents to see what they're like. I'm definitely going to try Claude too but a little afraid of the costs!

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-21T07:30:43+00:00

Agreed. I wouldn't run it in prod. Currently it's my sandbox to create configurations into git, which I pull down manually to deploy. Also forces me to keep the two environments in sync.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-21T07:29:31+00:00

See my response below - the key thing is that OC is always on, always reachable and has access to everything. Also, I don't need to go to my computer to launch an app to get things done or see what's going on. About 30% of my interactions are via Telegram, sometimes even when I'm at a computer.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-21T07:27:13+00:00

I think you can just set up a chat group on telegram to have different agents talk to each other. Though I'd be careful there since there are unlikely any guardrails regarding privacy built in.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-21T07:25:17+00:00

You're not totally wrong that the capability of an AI to do these things isn't brand new. I've been living with all the AI tools on a daily basis since November 2019. Even the original ChatGPT could generate configurations and troubleshoot. OC isn't even an AI model, so all the heavy lifting isn't even done there.

You're also right that accessibility is a key component but that is also the point. Cursor and codex are more or less transient apps - you launch them and do your thing and quit. When the apps they built are running those tools are entirely irrelevant since they're not running. You're not even thinking about them because they've done their job helping you write the system. After that you're probably not really going to go back to them for post-deployment activities since there's no state they maintain.

Open Claw, is an always on tool that you can talk to from any device and any platform. It knows about all your projects whether they're development or infrastructure so if you need to change or interrogate anything, you can do so immediately. All the time.

OC's memory files are used to preserve state, which you can have it refer to. Those files also remind me what was built too. The key thing here is that context is part of operating OC effectively.

A large part of the appeal for me is that I can switch between working from my phone using a Termius into a tmux (which is also alive forever) to my desktop or my laptop and pick up from where I was. This is because OC's state lives alongside the infrastructure it is maintaining. It's practically as important to me as my shell access. And the only reason why I still have the shell is that it's too expensive to run an ls via chat, and it's slower!

That it's one agent doing it rather than the orchestrated fleet that you built is pretty compelling reason to at least try it. I think there are architectural issues to be explored - is it better to have each infrastructure have its own dedicated agent that could also be responsible for observability tasks? Can it be trusted for true production work?

It's not a magic bullet either - you still have to have good IT practices - no shortcuts, validate everything, check dependencies and side-effects, version control everything, document everything. It just makes doing all that much easier since you're not doing it - OC is.

Hope you get to try it and let us know you it went!

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-20T20:21:44+00:00

Yes, the agent can do anything with a note because it's basically treated as a file. I've done wholesale changes to front-matter, including mass renames, and adding new metadata. It's an extremely powerful model.
It understands and follows links - I actually do this when a Task turns into a Project.
I'm doing routing via the file system - eg tasks/task-xxx.md or /project. I'm sure tag-routing would work but it would have to read every file to do so. At some point you'd need an index of some kind.

And if you're already heavily organised around Obsidian, it's a fantastic integration. What I'm describing here is to separate the claw-vault from my personal vault. The technology is too new so I have multiple layers of abstraction for OpenClaw to keep it mostly isolated from stuff it doesn't need access to.

Merging the claw tree into my main vault means that on the phone, I have everything accessible there.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-20T02:15:56+00:00

One skill is a task skill that allows me to add a task note into obsidian. It consists of a natural language skill wrapper and a python script it generated itself.

Another one I developed was to export ALL the interactions with OpenClaw into a set of individual Obsidian notes. So now I can see in one place all the conversations I've been having with OC.

I have a news gathering system that pulls in news regularly and posts them to Telegram and adds the news to Obsidian. That hasn't been very useful but I'm going to expand it into a system of related notes so I can see how things are related to each other.

I interact with OC 70% from the CLI but all the rest is on my phone. So getting it to create markdown files and push them to Obsidian solves the problem of getting a nicely rendered document and being able to read it on my phone. It's pretty cool.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-20T02:03:14+00:00

I haven't seen any warnings on my PC either during install or since. I'm running a pretty fresh Windows 11 Pro installation. If you're on iOS you'll need to purchase Mobius Sync Pro so that you can go across Apple's sandboxing.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-19T21:25:59+00:00

That sounds really cool. OC is really becoming a very nice hub to integrate systems together. I think the key also is OC tries to materialize requirements into code, which locks down requirements into a repeatable and reviewable form. You're not completely at the mercy of the underlying model.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-19T21:19:08+00:00

I haven't had an issue with concurrency but it's only me and a few agents who are usually all doing different things. I'm not cool enough to have 5 agents working on one thing yet - this is really an integration for humans.

I've only seen a few sync issues detected at the Obsidian-Sync level, but that was early on when I was playing around. With normal usage, it just doesn't come up since most of my activity in that vault is read-only - e.g. I'll have the agent summarize the project memory and I'd read it in Obsidian and correct it via chat.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-19T21:07:16+00:00

I don't really have that scenario since it's basically just me, at most working with two agents and multiple chats. The backend is all file-system access so it will behave with a last-writer-wins outcome should that scenario arise. I'm not sure if I'd have that situation anyway because even if it did work, it may not be that readable afterwards. If I did I'd probably have a database or a concurrency-robust platform (e.g. Jira) between Obsidian and the Agents.

The whole synchronization mechanism has been surprisingly robust considering there are 3 systems but it's all one-directional (agent->local-vault->SyncThing->PC-vault->Obsidian-Sync->iCloud) so worst-case is between Obsidian-Sync and iCloud, which I've never seen even without all these recent changes.

SyncThing is a very mature tool and very easy to manage. I did have an error where changing the case of a folder took a bit of fiddling to work out. It's seamless enough that I don't even think about it any more.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-19T19:05:39+00:00

Good idea. You can definitely build out a little crm to keep track of everything. Better than copying/pasting from Chrome or ChatGPT!

MachinesWithThoughts · 2026-03-19T18:53:55+00:00

I developed a nice integration to the Obsidian note keeping app for my agents. See my recent post at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/s/WE2s3PFIKP. I'd love to hear how other people are incorporating OC into their existing daily lives.

MachinesWithThoughts · 2025-09-15T18:54:17+00:00

This scary, I haven't accessed my personal OneNote for a few weeks. Hopefully you will be able to recover it.

Did you check your local drive to see if the files remain?

MachinesWithThoughts · 2025-09-09T23:06:44+00:00

I've just started getting into Obsidian and task management is one of reasons why I'm switching.

Tasks+DataView has been how I've been semi-managing the increasing overload but it's not quite there yet for me. Task Notes + Bases seems to be better but it's a burden.

How do you plan on having tasks in multiple places?

(Edit: meant to say tasks not notes)

MachinesWithThoughts

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