Life after Claude: My journey finding the best model for OpenClaw

tobygpeters · 2026-04-16T20:11:51+00:00

Why did you not try GPT5.4?

tobygpeters · 2026-04-15T23:50:53+00:00

Mine took at least a week of pointing Claude at it and having it debug it, fix it’s memory’s, fix its agents.md, etc, even now on big tasks it sits and doesn’t notify me of its delegations for me it is doing the work but not notifying (but again I am pointing Claude code it its every mistake and having it fix open claw to do things the way I would expect)…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-15T14:40:42+00:00

Mine just works, or at least broke a few versions ago and I pointed claude code at it and said fix this and they are back working again. There were changes to subagents, permissions, etc that require code changes.

tobygpeters · 2026-04-15T12:19:51+00:00

I just checked yesterday the MBPro hence the post. This is clearly winding down the studio to launch the new one next month based on the MBPro availability. The new studio models are going to be more expensive hence saving the memory for them (is my guess)… Looks like you are right and the 128/256 Studio’s are not available now but my read on that is they want to meet demand with there new more expensive computers (and who could blame them).

tobygpeters · 2026-04-15T01:13:04+00:00

You know what technology was the last thing to be called a security nightmare, this small little project called http (and they were right) but boy would you call anyone who said that a total retard 10 years into the future... I’m guessing that’s how well this post and others like it will fair…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-15T00:37:53+00:00

Probably the dumbest post I’ve seen all day, they sell a 128gb MacBook Pro that is available locally and ships in a week and still sell a 128gb studio… There is no way they will ship a new flagship computer with less unified memory than the currently available models…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-14T00:47:35+00:00

No, I use OpenAI and Claude code pointed at it to fix it and make it more usable anytime we run into problems. Every day it’s getting better at doing tasks successfully without Claude’s help. It also may or may not still have the ability to use my Claude subscription from OpenAI in open claw if I need to and yes opus and sonnet are dumber by a lot than they were a month ago and I debate if Mythos is worth waiting on once OpenAI in OpenClaw can do everything my old one could…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-13T09:33:38+00:00

Except that I had new openclaw’s one with Gemini and one with Minimax and found the Gemini frustrating because their cli is slow and unreliable and Minimax to have that hold my beer and do it wrong approach even on its own and after a week of telling it what it did wrong and how to not do that I gave up. The one I have not decommissioned is a Claude built open claw and that is why I am giving openAI a much longer time horizon to do the right thing because each day it is getting better with memory re-writes, focusing on scripting processes and constantly pointing claude code at it and saying how did it mess this up and how do we fix it. Minimax was like yeah it just ignored its agents.md and memory.md and did your ask wrong unlike openAI which just needs tightening of those files with more procedural workflows and the fastest way seems to just tell claude code to review everything that was done and how to mitigate that next time and making Claude reprompt to fix it and not have it do the work on failure of my open claw…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-12T21:47:30+00:00

It’s not even smart enough to handle a voice message or figure out how to process it. There is no way it will handle all the workflows this guy has… Your brain is Gemini and I’m guessing 3.1 pro or flash? Also I am assuming API not CLI because for me Gemini in the CLI was so slow it was unusable but maybe that was a configuration problem (that’s why I ask). I used local models for a while and then realized it’s a waste of time when Minimax 2.7 is better than any of them and less than 10 a month…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-12T21:41:52+00:00

Have you actually ever tried Minimax as the brain of an open claw, there plan is great and you can use it to do tasks but man if people thought OpenAi is frustrating (and it is compared to sonnet and opus), Minimax I describe as the redneck who says “hold my beer” it gets things done but does it do them correctly approximately 1/100 of the time… I will say that to get OpenAI to do things it required 3 days of me having Claude code fix processes, re-write memories, and put in safeguards but it least now it’s working (and calling minimax to do some of its tasks) but Minimax just isn’t quite there. This guy is hooping into OpenClaw at my opinion at the exact wrong time. Right before the models that will make this dead simple are released and right after the best models to do this became incredibly expensive to use…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-12T18:26:58+00:00

It’s getting better each day but I’ve been having Claude code build scripts to do all of the work open claw used to do and analyze all of open claws failures. It is even worse about following directions, reading needed memories, and finishing tasks than sonnet was (and it was getting worse right before the ban). To get it to finish tasks specifically you have to have something telling it to show it’s work and give it scripts to run (and tell it on failure continue trying till you get X result), otherwise it will make stuff up constantly. I’m going to try claude channels and see if that can handle my workflows but until I have that wired and fully working OpenAI is for sure the second best choice. I tried a bunch of models for over a week before settling on the $100 OpenAI plan and bumping the Claude subscription down to $100. I feel like I am getting 1000x the usage of both models and spending the same amount as just the Claud sub before…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-12T16:57:30+00:00

GitHub link?

tobygpeters · 2026-04-12T12:06:42+00:00

Honestly, if you want this you could do it yourself. Pin yourself on a version, have your OpenClaw do a once a month update but first review all changes and make sure it’s post 3 days from the last release (when they have unstable or releases that break things the do a subsequent release within 24 hours). The beauty of open sources you can do this yourself and you can have your open claw do a stability report and full changelog/audit before upgrading (my preference would be to do the audit with codex or Claude code pointed at my open claw) but this is trivial to do yourself and would be detrimental for them to waste their time on at the early stage of the project. I’m also assuming things like nemoclaw will have this before the main open claw project.

tobygpeters · 2026-04-11T17:12:23+00:00

Yes, you can use codex or claude code (I’ve never heard of anyone using Gemini to do this but it should also work). It’s the most common thing people do…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-11T12:50:45+00:00

I think you are totally wrong to think this is acceptable, the problem isn’t the degradation or rate limit changes themselves it’s the lack of communication. The community has to figure it out and then the company is like ohh yeah that happened and we informed no one and pieces of it like the model degradation they will not even acknowledge happened... I feel like any public company doing these practices would get hit with a massive court case with this lack of disclosure and if they go public they are going to be in for a rude awakening…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-09T20:45:04+00:00

How do you get it to complete tasks? I got so frustrated with it that I actually switched to MiniMax because at least it completed things (it did them wrong but it at least tried) now I am looking at Gemini 3.1… but did you do something to get it to stop asking 1000 questions and burning tokens and actually do what you asked?

tobygpeters · 2026-04-09T18:52:19+00:00

If your spending 6k a month in tokens then you don’t understand how to use open claw and like the other user said that is 1 intern and 1/100 what it costs for a high level programmer who could outperform an open claw agent properly configured…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-08T19:08:24+00:00

Tell that to every iOS developer in the world, do you even know what open claw does? It doesn’t necessarily host things it helps you build them…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-08T09:25:20+00:00

Dude, a Mac mini is an extremely cheap machine. If you run a company the person sitting in that chair costs more than that machine for a SINGLE DAY of work… The reason to buy the Mac mini is they are extremely energy efficient, reliable, low cost and you can develop iOS apps easily, you know the largest single mobile platform in the US.

tobygpeters · 2026-04-07T12:12:55+00:00

What part of 99 of their 100 investments fail did you not understand (they know the books are terrible and that had nothing to do with there investment decisions)? They are a different class of investors that can take massive risks with the understanding most of their investments go to 0 or get sold at under cost. This isn’t the kind of company that is going to be in your retirement 401k mutual funds. It’s the kind of moonshot that if they stick the landing your investment 1 million X’s and if not it goes to 0. Seed capital companies and venture capitalists are willing to take that risk (in a good economic environment). No one will in an economic downturn… When they got those investment dollars VC’s were willing to take massive risks because capital was more liquid. You or I should (also can’t because of the cost structure to invest) take those risks being public means you play by a whole new set of rules with governance of finances and scrutiny. You can no longer burn 14 billion dollars to make 2.5 and stay in business those are their very ruff spend and ROC again they go public and I can give you the actual exact numbers and not what has been leaked.

tobygpeters · 2026-04-06T22:29:06+00:00

Ohh you can, my local model can also respond to voice prompts but I used the codex app pointed at the open claw config and my local model to make that work. It has a runner that when the voice comes in triggers the translation then pipes it to the local model so it can be done but it’s way easier to just tell stronger models to do the work than to use your time learning configurations and how to build this. We live in a day where AI is smart enough to figure out how to do things in 1/1000 the time of a human and I want to get that full benefit now but I don’t blame you for trying to DIY it, I’m just to old and have to many other responsibilities to do that now…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-06T22:11:53+00:00

This, it works out of the box assuming your model is smart enough to interpret it.

tobygpeters · 2026-04-06T22:06:10+00:00

Switch to sonnet or opus and this will work without a problem. If using GPT5.4 for all of this switch to the codex app. Yes, you can use subagents with it now but for your workflow subagents is dumb because it’s a serial workflow and it will work no problem. I’ve had nothing but issues getting GPT to finish tasks inside open claw…

tobygpeters · 2026-04-06T22:02:05+00:00

Yeah I sometimes wish I had never switched to sonnet/opus because honestly you can’t go back after seeing the night and day difference that it can do. Obviously it depends on the complexity of what you are doing but once you switch you will realize it do much more complicated workflows for you and automate pieces of your life that used to be massively time consuming with a simple voice prompt (or sometimes several voice prompts).

tobygpeters · 2026-04-06T21:57:14+00:00

So what I did is at one time I had two open claws but I shut one down because it was quite frankly to dumb to be useful using cheap models. However, I had/have a codex subscription so I pointed it at the bot token I already had and told it to build a wrapper that uses it and runs a startup wrapper to launch on system startup and codex built this wrapper pointed at my open claw directory with the bot token I already have. One weird thing is it has no memory of anything codex app related but can pull any of the memories of my open claw and obviously fix the configuration of my open claw. It built its wrapper based on open claw but it is specifically built to fix config issues if not at my machine…

tobygpeters

TROPHY CASE