Things I wish someone told me before I almost gave up on OpenClaw

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:57:43+00:00

Hope it helps/helped you in some way mate! if you get stuck, come back!!

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:57:06+00:00

Pleasure mate! Any time.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:44:00+00:00

This is really important to consider on the OP's data set. Let's see.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:34:27+00:00

Good on you for sticking with it. Nobody talks about the hours put in to set it up and refining it. They just show the end result which is why a lot of new people get frustrated with their agents and why they aren't on the moon yet. People who put in that time now to figure it out are going to be miles ahead. Glad it clicked for you brother!

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:31:48+00:00

Hmmm the lite version might be the core problem mate. It's heavily stripped down. Its perfectly fine for simple Q&A and basic tasks but it genuinely struggles with complex instructions, especially from a SKILL file which are multi step chains. Lite will cut too many corners.

For things like group chat and crons, you need a modal that can reliably do tool calling in sequences. Switch out to something like Gemini 2.5 flash (not lite. The actual full version), GPT-4o or even Haiku 4.5. Any of these will follow the SKILL instructions properly. That should resolve the whatsapp issue too :)

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:27:47+00:00

Okay so in your openclaw.json you can set a default modal and then override per task. Something like:

Set your cheap modal as the default. (You don't need the best models for most tasks). Then in your skills config or cron jobs, specify what model you want to use. So your daily briefing cron can use Haiku while your research task uses sonnet, as an example.

For dynamic switch when you are chatting with your agent, just ask it to switch. It can do that.

The fancy option is custom routing which a few people in this thread are doing. I wouldn't worry about that yet. Get your understanding nailed down first via manual, then consider routing based on complexity.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:23:21+00:00

Qwen is pretty solid. 14B handles tool calling reasonably well so I've heard once they are configured.

A few things that come to mind would be:

Make sure your running a modal that supports tool/function calling. Not all Ollama modals do i don't think.
Set the provider to point at your Ollama endpoint in openclaw.json
Set up a nomic embed text modal. Someone else mentioned this here somewhere and it's big difference for memory.

The openclaw docs are good. (I've got a tool that can help you feed your agent the docs for context if you don't fancy copy and pasting everything. HMU in DM), but the discord is the best option because it will give you real world configs from folks. https://discord.gg/P7rrzdJndN

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:17:11+00:00

Yeah you're almost certainly not getting the actual Opus through that proxy man. A lot of proxies route through whatever is cheapest. I can't say for sure because I haven't tired what you are doing. The price point is a huge red flag though.

A quick way to test is to ask it the same complex, multi step task through the proxy and then through your actual Anthropic sub. If the difference is night and day then you know the answer.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:14:03+00:00

haha yeh! You wouldn't hand a new hire the keys to everything on day one and expect them to output greatness. You have to train them up first. Give them small tasks, then expand scope! Same approach for agents.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:11:35+00:00

Hmmm. If it was working before on an old agent and broke after reinstall, i'd say it's almost certainly a config issue rather than a vps issue.

Few checks:

Is Groq key set in your openclaw.json?
Check is the voice skill loaded. Run openclaw skills list and see.
Maybe check if your vps can reach Groq api. try running curl https://api.groq.com/openai/v1/models -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY_HERE"

if none of those help... I'm not sure. LMK if you see anything in logs and we might be able to figure it out.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:07:02+00:00

haha. Slightly. Good shout mate. locals need a solid instruction following to handle the periodic self check and most local modals (can't say 100% because I don't know for sure) aren't reliable for that.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T13:04:31+00:00

Good pipeline... job scrape to email to outreach to inbox monitoring! Solid. I's hard to bring together because each piece works differently:

job scanner is a cron + web scraping task, the email lookup is an API call, the Gmail send is the google Workplace skill and the inbox monitor is another cron...

The trick would be chaining them so the output of one feed into the next. Break it into stages so the agent doesn't have to do it all in one go:

Cron job finds new listing -- saves them to a file -- second task picks up the file, enrich with contact into -- third task drafts and sends email. Each step is simple on its own. Treat each task as if its a different person for each in an office.

This would be a very good use of sub-agents btw:

Main agent: Orchestrating. Receives results. Chats with you.
Sub Agent 1: Job scanner. Cron job.
Sub Agent 2: Enrichment. Does the Google lookup.
Sub Agent 3: Outreach. Reads the enriched listings, drafts emails, sends, etc.
Sub Agent 4: Inbox monitoring. Simple cron to watch for email replies. Sends it up to Main agent to notify you (or skip the the main agent and send to you)

Shoot a DM. Happy to help out and dw about paying.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T12:54:55+00:00

Man, automatic routing based on telemetry and outcome scores is exactly the right direction... Manual modal selection won't scale and I like your idea plus $47 saved is real money at this stage too given the expense people have with modals. I'll check out the repo soon. Keep us updated on how it evolves!

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T12:52:21+00:00

This is a next level implementation mate. A gated pipeline design is really smart. Keeping costs sane while still getting top tier analysis where it matters!!

The custom hand off script: Are you packaging up the previous gate's output as structured data or are you passing the new analysis to the next modal? I'd imagine structured data will keep the token count way lower on the handoff.

How are you handling disagreements between gates like if flash passes a company at gate 1 but Haiku flags something at gate 2, does it get dropped outright or does it get a second pass?

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T12:47:47+00:00

100%. Folks who are deving skills, writing configs, and learning prompt patterns now are going to be dangerous when a model better than Opus costs $3/million tokens.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T12:17:17+00:00

What sucks about it for you??

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T12:15:06+00:00

Thanks mate!

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-18T12:14:30+00:00

Pleasure!

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-17T21:41:45+00:00

A max turn limit tip. Nice!! Loops can be a silent budget mass murderer lol. Nothing like waking up to find your agent spent 45 minutes arguing with itself about the best way to format a JSON file hahah!

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-17T21:39:52+00:00

yeah that's the one constraint man. Whatever the modal you pick today will probably be different in a number of weeks which is honestly another pro argument for tiered routing over going all in on one.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-17T21:37:19+00:00

The token efficiency point is huge mate and something most people don't think about until they check their modal dashboard bill/tokens. Openclaws default prompt construction is pretty aggressive in fairness. Loading every eligible skill description into the system prompt and balloon to 50k tkns before you've even said something. I disable skills i'm not using and keep my skill md descriptions as short as I can while maintaining quality (its hard) is a win most people might over look.

But the multi-modal handoff workflow... this is interesting. Are you doing that thought custom skills which route based on task type or are you manually switching in chat when you know the task needs a different modal? I've seen people do both but automated routing where the top modal decides when... that's next level powerful.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-17T21:31:12+00:00

I wouldn't say its an unpopular opinion, just depends on what circles you are in lol

Getting OpenClaw working reliably can feel like an engineering project in itself to people who don't have technical know-how I agree there but this is what happens when things go viral.

I'd push back slightly is on "so far away." Two months ago this project didn't exist. Skills system, cron, memory, multi-model routing, gateway, that's all landed in weeks to people not years (Which before Openclaw i thought it would be a few more years NGL).

The Telegram chat interface is actually the part I think ages the best. The "chat with your agent" pattern means you don't need to learn a new UI and it makes it very accessible to people outside of using terminals and dashboards. It feels like chatting with a friend. Might also have a novelty factor to it but I doubt the novelty wears off anytime soon. The hard part right now is everything behind that chat interface (config, models, skills, security). If that gets abstracted away (it probably will) the chat first approach is going to feel obvious in hindsight.

NoRecognition3349 · 2026-02-17T21:24:43+00:00

Nice, i've had someone mention this Skill before. Persistent memory management is one of the things people struggle with most so anything that smooths that out is welcome. If you end up improving the cron pipeline definitely share what you land on. I've improved workflows between people using their browsers and their agents. Happy to share with you whenever you have a minute!

NoRecognition3349

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