OpenClaw is designed for people who are okay with "Don't worry about it" being an acceptable answer to "How does this work?"

Which is why it's so big with the PM/PO-turned-vibe-coder crowd.

I'd assume anything empowered to read+send email from my personal accounts and read+modify my calendars to be security critical.

I guess you're not one of those "Don't worry about it" people

Hard to turn off when one's professional job/value is 'worry about things and find ways to efficiently minimize risk'

Use a vps and only give access to what you need.

Let's be honest, the number of people who are doing that << the amount of OpenClaw-preinstalled hardware that's being sold alone

Not my problem

When I tried OpenClaw it quickly turned into a lethargic mess which I really didn't see myself wanting to maintain long term. I looked at other alternatives which were similar enough to do what I was looking for (mostly scheduled tasks using data on my computer and some API data). I saw a mention of nanoclaw which I looked at but didn't try personally. I eventually settled on trying picoclaw[1] because it was extremely small, fast, and had enough features to do the job for me. It is under 10mb, fairly straight forward go codebase, and works with multiple model providers or locally hosted.

1 https://picoclaw.io/

I’ve concluded that if you already use a coding agent then openclaw adds very little (at least the multiple rounds I’ve tried it since mid Jan), it mainly brought the power of do-everything coding agents to your phone, available everywhere. But you exchange a low quality messaging interface for that ease of access.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating that people that benefit from openclaw move to coding agents. This isn’t a “dropbox is just SFTP” comment, more that if you are already using coding agents, it feels like they do most of what I saw from openclaw at least a few months ago.

Am I missing something? Would love to be proven wrong.

It's not only that, all this complexity leads to stuff breaking with every update. For a tool that's supposed to just answer chat messages it's impressive how crappy and unstable this software feels. I have it running since the release and my primary usecase seems to be to use the CLI to fix whatever broke this week.

Would not recommend running this, it's the antithesis of the Linux philosophy.

Which features do you require?

I built an agent to work with local Ollama models, and it will keep working and iterate on a goal until finished, but it doesn't do sub-agents or or any of the "just burn a million tokens but finish this" pipelines that seem to be the trend now.

It's a simple D executable that basically consumes no resources in your local machine.

You may be interested in https://nanoclaw.dev/. It uses Claude by default but can run other harnesses after initial setup. Easier to grok IMHO.

There's a lot of similar projects out there that are closer to what you're looking for. For example, I used nanoclaw for a bit before switching to Hermes.

See if you like [Msty Go](https://msty.ai/go)