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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.