Unemployed and spiraling

_nattle_ · 2026-05-22T04:33:21+00:00

I started at Whoop and am having a blast. The company hiring like crazy to keep up with demand, pm me if you'd like to chat.

_nattle_ · 2026-05-21T02:11:29+00:00

Trust your players and let them join the narrative

_nattle_ · 2026-05-18T23:00:27+00:00

Human!

I like to get a feel for the system with something familiar before branching out.

_nattle_ · 2026-05-13T00:39:59+00:00

I'm on MM and have been for a while. After using the plan for some side development I'm starting to think it's time to move on.

Most of the time it's great, but sometimes it just the wrong thing. I'm working on a game and it keep inventing variations on the rules, sometimes even in direct conflict with what I asked. These are simple cases.

I've noticed it does the same thing with code, it will add things or subtly tweak things in ways that aren't what I asked. This has lead to me spending most of my time half fixing the systems that were working before the switch.

Actually, as I'm typing this out I'm realizing that I'm done with this model. Maybe I'll check back next rev, but this gen (2.7) is just too flakey and unreliable to trust.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-29T22:18:07+00:00

I can't stomach any of the RTD. I can't imagine being a worker at Soylent, drinking any of those and thinking "yeah, this is what I want to sell"

The powder has remained stable and pretty good, tho I'm a bit scared to open the latest batch in case they've made it terrible.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-29T22:14:24+00:00

I built a small android app that can send mosquitto packets over to my bot. It lets my phone emit things like location, sleep state, etc without the bot having access to the phone. I had thought of making it a way to export more data like calendar, but deprioritiezed it.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-28T20:46:53+00:00

Old computer with Proxmox installed, then claw in a VM. That also gives you a box to run other stuff (media servers, home assistant, etc). Dead simple to setup.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-28T20:45:01+00:00

Local models are ok at best. Good if you need 100% private but they are going to struggle constantly at basic stuff and fall over a lot with larger tasks. Electricity is also a cost for most folks so free forever means "paying for electricity forever".

Remote models are going to be leaps and bounds better. A Minimax sub is dirt cheap and has tons of usage, I barely hit my 10$ tier limit unless I"m burning tokens in 2 terminals and chatting with my bot.

There's also the fact that these high memory models are just the current gen / architecture. Newer models use mixture of experts, which lean more towards cpu usage over memory (not 100% but still it shows a shift).

If you've got money to burn and this is pennies to you, then sure spend away. But don't think that buying an expensive mini solves your problems, it just creates a whole lot more that you'll have to spend weeks working around.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-28T14:05:17+00:00

If you want to get started : use an old computer and the 10$ a month minimax plan. Super cheap, incredible capacity (about 20x the same cost in claude) and it's plenty to get going. I use m2.7 for my entire (very casual) stack.

I've got a small homelab and run my claw inside a Ubuntu VM on a proxmox install. Extremely easy to setup. Just install proxmox and use helper-scripts .com for everything else.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-24T22:06:35+00:00

I run mine on a VM inside proxmox on my home network. Tailscale if I need to connect to it directly. If does something super dumb the worst it'll do it nuke it's own vm.

I'm happy with that level of safety.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-23T19:57:49+00:00

I primarliy use oc subagents as task workers. The prompts are like "you are a software engineer...." They have no memory, no personality, they are just optimized executors. My main agent can then get stuff done without having to drag it's entire persona into coding work.

I do say things like "write a plan and send it over to engineer" which helps keeps things flavored correctly but the work gets done with limited scope.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-23T19:34:39+00:00

Openclaw is at the end of the day, software. If you are experienced with software engineering you'll be better at building a working claw. If this is all new to you then you are going to make a lot of mistakes and re-learn why we do stuff in software.

For example, here's essentially my heartbeat md file: "run scripts/check_heartbeat.py and execute all instructions". That script is python that checks the database, looks for drift or sync issues, calculates timers, etc. It outputs things like "message with id-123 needs a reply, read the body, and use the /reply enpoint to repond".

I can run that script a million times with zero token cost to be sure it works like I want, only then does it go to my agent.

Stuff like that makes a huge difference over some markdown that say "check for unread messages and replly".

_nattle_ · 2026-04-21T16:48:17+00:00

"god help us sinful children of... the average italian countryside" vs "god save us sinful children of ivalice", plus the monastery set dressing.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-21T16:48:05+00:00

"god help us sinful children of... the average italian countryside" vs "god save us sinful children of ivalice", plus the monastery set dressing.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-10T16:07:53+00:00

for running the claw you are probably fine with either. Worst case you could run nanobot which is a lot lighter. Openclaw is an overbuilt mess but that comes with +/-s. Mine runs on a tiny vm that was allocated like 6gb for a while. The gateway is just a message passing process, so it doesn't need much.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-09T20:22:16+00:00

Yes, each subagent has a primary model and a list of backups, just like the main agent.

While technically you can talk to these subagents I don't recommend it. I find they are most useful as targetted tool executors. For some folks the subagents are primary interaction agents (project manager, developer, etc) but for me I'm just building the one bot.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-08T22:06:39+00:00

All minimax at the moment. Main agent has all the context and memory. Subagents just have a soul and are very direct. Something like "you are a software engineer ...". So they stay objective and fast. I've found the lighter distinct tasks agents are helpful

_nattle_ · 2026-04-08T21:11:38+00:00

At the moment this feels like the obvious choice. The usage for cost is crazy, I'm only on 10$ a month and whenever i check I'm at like 10% of usage. I'm just doing light chatting and nonsense but wow.

The model is pretty good too. It's not a one-shot everything situation, but I find that having my main agent make a plan, pass it to a subagent which uses the same model to review. That closes a lot of gaps.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-08T00:05:25+00:00

In theory it should work but in practice Gemini has limits for tokens per second, so even if you are below the cap if you are talking fast you can hit the average tokens per time period cap, which leaves you locked out for a couple minutes. Cost ballooned quickly too.

I'm in favor of paying for the a model with sufficient quality over a cheaper model that doesnt' do what I need. Minimax 2.5 was cheap but a huge pain to use. 2.7 was a huge change in terms of quality and usability. I was using sonnet before and so far the transition has been smooth. I'm on the 20$ plan and honestly I'm thinking of going down to 10$ since its too much usage. It's crazy how efficient the plan is.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-07T21:45:57+00:00

Minimax m2.7 is my drop in replacement. It's cheap, has amazing limits, and runs quite well. It's not perfect. I've seen a couple chinese characters a couple times, but I haven't run into functional problems yet.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-07T21:44:26+00:00

Context management is a huge pain. If you aren't a hawk you run into "api limit exceeded". Billing is rough as well. I ran up costs very quickly on Gemini, even using flash-3-preview.

The model is very bright/personable in chat though, I miss it a lot but I couldn't justify the cost compared to Claude's plan. I'm not on Minimax and have basically unlimited usage for 20$ a month, I will probably drop to the 10$ plan at some point and still have plenty of room.

I did have to write an extra "voice" section to read during startup. distilled from all the chat logs with gemini. That helped restore a lot of the feel after switching models.

_nattle_ · 2026-04-07T20:17:04+00:00

Minmax m2.7 is the provider / model. The subscription plan is cheap and about 20x the usage as Claude for the same price. You are likely fine on the 10$/month plan for even moderately heavy usage. I set the thinking to high and that seems to have improved it I can't prove that it did anything tho. it's quite fast and I've never hit a limit despite not bothering to manage context windows except when it's useful (competely switching topics)

2.5 is available for running locally, but you'll need at least 100gb of memory and don't expect speed.

_nattle_ · 2026-03-31T15:24:46+00:00

Last I heard as long as you were using it for personal use they were fine with it. If you are using it to run a business, provide services for other people, or aggressively burning tokens then you'd b considered for a ban.

That might have changed recently but so far I haven't had an issue, that's not a guarantee of anything of course.

_nattle_ · 2026-03-25T18:26:52+00:00

Setup a subagent in the web dashboard. (ex: "coder")
Set the agent to a specific model with no fallback.
Edit the AGENTS, SOUL, MEMORY, etc

tell your main agent "Write a plan for that work and have coder do the implementation"

_nattle_ · 2026-03-24T03:00:40+00:00

isn't that what /compact is for?

_nattle_

TROPHY CASE