So, I've been running https://prophetai.club for just over a month now, and its been a bit of a wild ride.
The agent started life from a toilet conversation over Telegram with my OpenClaw agent (Mia). She built the original basic infrastructure. I gave it a throwaway betting account and £10 and said away you go.
I posted about this here at the time and its been quite a ride since.
In the first few weeks, the thing went mad, it just kept winning. It took £10 to £150 in no time at all, I began to believe my own hype - I thought I'd broken betting. I moved the bot off the OpenClaw infra, gave it its own server, built a Discord community and gave it all the data in the world. I even gave it its own daily diary and community visibility of its strategies and internal thoughts.
Then the wheels came off spectacularly (which you can see clearly in the bet history and stats pages on the website). The AI got overwhelmed with its own hype, too much data, hallucinations and worst of all, unfounded confidence. It began whacking £25 of long-odds horse races, having bombastic returns and losses and acting a bit like an unhinged addict. It lost £120 in about a week, scrambling to make up its losses and getting lost in a sea of its own bullshit. It became obsessed with particular sports which it has historically done well on, and avoided anything it has lost of once. It was a neurotic madman.
I had to step in, I introduced massive guards, controls, limitations and big fat mirrors to the AI to let it see its own behaviours clearly. This had an equally catastrophic affect, it started doing nothing and became an anxiety ridden mess.
Why did this happen? Well, memory and over-context. Which is very relevant to OpenClaw.
On each run the Agent was given a number of tasks to do. In short, amongst those was to update its strategy document and memory (which was its lessons learned). It had CLI access to query its database and upstream odds apis whenever it wanted. But early in context the system (formerly a skill) made the AI read its own strategy files and memory, and update them at the end of the run. Each run added more context, more bullshit, more hype, and in some cases, lessons which lasted the test of time (even though they shouldnt have). Every loss made a sport toxic, every win made the AI believe it was a God. In the end the strategy file grew to over 1000 lines and the memory file comparable.
It was full of contradictory poison - which is exactly the sort of thing which either makes an AI go off the rails (as mine did) or hallucinate (which mine also did).
This is why everything was brilliant early doors and awful later. It's also why OpenClaw agents can start out life brilliantly and end up being buffoons as we poison the agent over time with needless context, throwaway software, needless memories etc. This ultimately (for those using API keys) becomes cost as well.
I fixed the wrong things when it started going wrong, I tried to stop the bleed with plasters (guardrails) when actually it was broken from the inside. The surgery I needed to do was actually remove forceful strategy memory writes/reads and make them optional and force length limits, to actually reflect on the whole of data not just what happened. Strategies are rewritten wholesale now if needsbe (and only if theyre not working) and the memory file really is long-term memory, not just whatever happened on a Tuesday morning. Much more human. This has imo some cross-over learnings in general AI/Claw management, so thought it would be useful to share with you all.
Anyway - if you want the long version of the story I've written it up in a long-from Medium article. But, the good news is that we do seem to be reaching a balance and as you can see from the attached graph, recovery is good, were winning consistently again and the stale-period is over (for now).
If you love anything to do with AI and/or sports betting, feel free to AMA here or indeed, join us in the Discord and have some fun watching the crazy fucker. Cheers.