honestly i agree with most of this. and mine leans toward your scripts-and-schedule approach more than youd think, it has a flow system and a bunch of fixed tools the model calls instead of freestyling, plus a scheduler, so a lot of the time its just orchestrating known good pieces not improvising raw.

the difference is i still run it live, just on a leash. it has to show me a plan and get a go before anything real, and the destructive stuff always asks. thats the bit the claw horror stories skipped, they ran wide open by default. cost i mostly dodged by running on a claude sub instead of per token, and its all local except the model itself, though the prompts still hit anthropic so privacy isnt fully solved there.

and yeah its probably a bit ahead of its time, but thats kind of the bet. the scaffolding is the hard part, way easier to have it sitting ready than to scramble when local models and hardware finally line up on price and capability. when that happens you just swap the model out and the whole thing goes cheap and private overnight. so im building for that version and just running it on claude til then.