I am preparing to do my fourth install of OpenClaw. I have spent more time solving issues caused by OpenClaw than it has ever spent doing actual work for me.
OpenClaw is an agentic program. It essentially orchestrates your LLM sessions, tools, and skills, and does something really promising — if LLMs can tell you what to do, OpenClaw can actually do it. When it works, it is magic.
I feel like I have been working with an Alzheimer’s patient. Between trying over a dozen different LLM models, pumping hundreds of dollars into API tokens, and attempting to locally host, this has gone from a brilliant companion that I could see doing amazing things for me to an absolute bumbling idiot. I have spent more time in Claude and Grok trying to solve problems with OpenClaw than actually getting it to work.
I have to say, as I have been working with OpenClaw over the last month, it has been interesting to watch the security and features develop. It is really becoming a robust platform. There are more options than you would believe for something this new, and it has remarkable capabilities when it works.
Here is where the problem is, and maybe I have finally learned my lesson. OpenClaw can update itself, but it can also brick itself. Gateway misconfigs, broken vital connections, all kinds of issues. The bottom line is, I have had my OpenClaw commit suicide three times now. It is crazy. I have tried giving it instruction sets to set up reversion techniques. I have tried having it back up vital files. Whatever the case is, it just seems to find a way to kill itself so thoroughly that it isn’t worth trying to figure out what went wrong.
On this last one, something happened that broke all my tool connections, and I was having to go through and rebuild those one at a time manually. When I had it do a fairly minor update and it didn’t come back up, I about threw the PC across the room.
So yeah. I am reinstalling it on a new OS, one more time. I’m getting much better at it now. Maybe this time it won’t break.
I’m not holding my breath.
