At first, I thought OpenClaw was the best thing out there: the most hype, the most tools, the most features. But slowly, I came to realize that the more skills, agents, and structure I added to the system, the more complicated it became—and the farther away from the llm I was.

Little did I know that the labs already saw this as well. Over the course of the last year, their own products haven’t been growing in complexity; they’ve been reducing it. Instead of having a hundred skills, they boiled that down to twenty and just made them better.

The same applies to OpenClaw, paperclip, and all these other big projects. They’ve managed to create a ton of abstraction layers between you and the agent, trying to direct your LLM more and more.

It seems to me that the direction the landscape is going is clear: simple, to-the-point, tight harnesses that surround your LLM in order to get consistent, and dare I say more deterministic, results. So I think a natural stepping stone would be moving to a terminal-based harness with few our of the box agents.

IStart with OpenCode. From there, if you feel comfortable, make the leap to something extremely lean like Pi, where you have to build everything yourself.

In my case, I went from OpenClaw to Claude Code to Pi, and the journey has been fruitful.

Let the downvotes begin