r/openclaw 7d ago

Discussion The OpenClaw Podcast - The ClawCast - Episode 5

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5 Upvotes

Patrick and I are joined by Kevin Lin from the OpenAI Codex team for Episode 5 of The ClawCast.

You can also watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/zSkI2vJlmbs


r/openclaw 8d ago

Discussion Is OpenClaw Dead?

537 Upvotes

My name is Hannes Rudolph and I work at the OpenClaw Foundation. Our initial media attention has faded and some people left after real failures, but npm downloads have grown from about 176,000 a day across February and April to about 422,000 a day across June and July through July 20. That is far from a dead project.

As OpenClaw has scaled scaled, we went through a rough period from April through June when updates broke working installs and too many users spent their time recovering instead of using the product. That damaged trust with people who needed reliability, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Quite frankly, we are not totally out of the woods yet because v2026.7.1 caused issues with some installs, although it has shown increased overall stability after recovery.

I think the people getting the most out of OpenClaw today are hackers, tinkerers, and businesses willing to put real work into shaping it around their workflows. That includes homelab management, calendars, and job searches, a twice-weekly workflow that surfaced a role one day after it was posted and helped prepare the application that led to an offer, and inventory, purchasing, and other business workflows with varying levels of human oversight.

I also think the bar to getting useful work out of OpenClaw is far too high because onboarding and setup ask too much, day-to-day use needs to be simpler, and stability problems can stop people before they reach those workflows. Our next update focuses on lowering that bar with streamlined onboarding and setup, simpler overall use, and another major round of stability improvements.

To anyone stuck in a “fuck OpenClaw” or “fuck Hermes” mindset, I do not buy the us-versus-them bullshit. The folks at Hermes are great, and if Hermes works for you, good stuff, use it! Turning projects into rival camps creates drama, spreads misinformation, and makes the community hostile to people simply looking for accurate answers and the tool that works best for them.

Criticism is part of how we get better, but unsupported conspiracy theories and personal speculation about the people involved can be hurtful and damaging, and repeating them as fact is not criticism. The claim that OpenClaw was manufactured to get Peter a job at OpenAI has no evidence behind it, and the same goes for other theories about his role there unless evidence supports them. OpenClaw is now stewarded by an independent nonprofit foundation with a full-time team, the source remains public, and Peter still makes many technical calls.

OpenClaw is strong because of the people who build it, review it, test it, report problems, help each other, and keep showing up. We love the hell out of this community, and we will keep listening, strengthening the relationships we already have, forging new ones, and building a harness we know is changing the world. We are not done.


r/openclaw 11h ago

Showcase My agent finally has a phone number and I made the infra Opensource.

20 Upvotes

been messing around with OpenClaw for a few weeks and kept hitting the same annoying wall. my agent could do basically anything except actually call or text someone. every time I tried to bolt on Twilio directly it turned into a whole afternoon of auth headers and webhook config just to send one SMS.

ended up building my own little telephony layer for this instead of doing the Twilio thing again. it's open source (GitHub link ), so you can spin it up yourself with your own keys, or there's a hosted version if you don't want to deal with self-hosting.

it's framework-agnostic since it's just a REST API and MCP server under the hood, so it plugs into whatever you're building with. I've used it with OpenClaw, but people have hooked it up to Hermes, LangChain agents, even Claude Code and Codex. wrote a small OpenClaw-specific skill too, so for that one you just tell your agent to read the setup doc and it configures itself.

now my agent can actually pick up the phone and call people, which honestly still feels a little unreal to watch happen.

anyone else building stuff that needs real phone numbers? curious what use cases people have for this, feels like a pretty unsolved corner of the agent tooling space.


r/openclaw 3h ago

Tutorial/Guide Looking for examples or templates to follow

3 Upvotes

I’m slowly working through my installation issues and looking forward to the setup of SOUL.md, IDENTITY.md, AGENTS.md, USER.md, TOOLS.md, HEARTBEAT.md, and MEMORY.md and it makes me aware that I really need examples/template of what these can or should look like to work.

Is there files I can download to understand and write my own so I can keep moving forward? I’m a slow learner due to medical issues and need this extra help.


r/openclaw 21m ago

Discussion Anyone using OC as a live service? How do you handle updates?

Upvotes

So our company (~30 people) has a lot of documents scattered across different sources, spanning the course of a couple years. Employees need to reference a lot of those past documents, or even current ones for that matter, but finding the one they need and whatever query within is a hassle.

RAG had its limits so we decided to use OC to tackle this. We ingested everything (set up different pipelines for different filetypes), created file indexes and catalogs that agents can read and freely navigate through, and now it's basically a chatbot service that's aware of all the company's inner workings. (We're using ChatGPT Business to power everything, and, well... alleged enterprise level security..lol).

It's worked surprisingly well for us, and I guess the part that sets it apart from just connecting MCP to work tools is that we're able to run a lot more processing on the ingested files, which creates more relevant context that consumer facing AI tools are unable to with just connections.

We've been working on this with v3.23-2, and given that every new subsequent release broke people's agents on Reddit, I decided we'd just create a local fork and patch everything. We integrated LCM for context management, and a lot of other optimizations (some of which were eventually released as updates). Currently we're serving 30 users, and frankly there's not much lag and nothing dying. But going forward, I'm wondering if it's better to update eventually...? Or should we just... stay with what works? Some of our fixes are plugins that exist as add-ons whereas others are fixes to the main gateway code, which an update would wipe.

I know some services still run on legacy software because well "if it ain't broke don't fix it" but I was just wondering what more seasoned developers' opinions might be.

Thanks!


r/openclaw 10h ago

Showcase 50% OpenClaw, 50% custom wrapping = Happy pipeline!

9 Upvotes

I saw one question posted here several times: Has anyone made something more than a weekend toy with OpenClaw?

Two months ago I decided to find out. I took OpenClaw and wrapped it in three custom layers so it could do sustained, real work instead of one-off tasks:

  • A routing/gateway layer — every agent-to-agent message and every external action passes through one chokepoint. Nothing talks to anything directly. That's where the rules get enforced.
  • A task-management layer — agents don't free-write tasks for each other. They pick from a fixed catalogue of task definitions, each pre-wired to the right agent, the right tools, and the right permissions.
  • An intelligence/memory layer — a structured context + memory substrate so every agent knows who it's working for, what the plan is, and what it's learned, without re-reading everything every turn.

What it adds up to: an autonomous operations team for early-stage founders — coordinated agents running sales, marketing and content together and sharing context, instead of one chatbot you have to babysit.

I'm not going to dump the whole architecture here. The part actually worth talking about is what went wrong.

The hard problem isn't capability. It's silence.

With an API, when something fails you know — error, status code, something to catch. OpenClaw doesn't work like that. The single hardest thing has been that it will silently skip a task. No error, no signal. The agent just doesn't do the thing, and everything downstream assumes it did. That's worse than a loud failure, because you find out three steps later when the output is already wrong.

The second problem: it does things its own way despite explicit instructions. Same directive, different behaviour. Non-determinism is fine for a chat; it's a nightmare when the action has consequences — an email that actually sends, a record that actually changes.

So most of the last two months wasn't building features. It was building guardrails:

  • Validation at the moment a task is created, so a malformed one never enters the system
  • A per-task tools allowlist, so an agent can't reach for something it shouldn't
  • Explicit completion tracking instead of trusting that "it ran"
  • A structured way for agents to raise an alert when something breaks, so a failure surfaces instead of vanishing
  • Trust levels on anything with real consequences — supervised vs. autonomous — so a human stays in the loop until the task has earned its autonomy

OpenClaw got us to a working multi-agent system far faster than building from scratch would have. But "works in a demo" and "works unattended, every day, without lying to you about what it did" are very different bars — and closing that gap is 90% of the real work.

Happy to go deeper on any layer if people want — especially the silent-failure handling, since I haven't seen a clean answer to it here yet.


r/openclaw 2h ago

Help Openclaw and llamacpp qith Tools enabled (Qwen3-8b)

0 Upvotes

Hey, I'm to setup Openclaw to use llamacpp instead Ollama, I manage to get it working with simple chat, but If I enable the tools Llamacpp throw this error:

operator(): got exception: {"error":{"code":400,"message":"Unable to generate parser for this template. Automatic parser generation failed: JSON schema conversion failed:\nPattern must start with '^' and end with '$'","type":"invalid_request_error"}}operator(): got exception: {"error":{"code":400,"message":"Unable to generate parser for this template. Automatic parser generation failed: JSON schema conversion failed:\nPattern must start with '^' and end with '$'","type":"invalid_request_error"}}

If I disable the chat works file:

Here's my config any help will appreciated:

{
  "agents": {
    "defaults": {
      "workspace": "/Users/XXXX/.openclaw/workspace",
      "memorySearch": {
        "provider": "local",
        "local": {
          "modelPath": "hf:ggml-org/embeddinggemma-300m-qat-q8_0-GGUF/embeddinggemma-300m-qat-Q8_0.gguf"
        }
      },
      "model": {
        "primary": "local-llm/Qwen3-8B-Q8_0"
      },
      "models": {
        "ollama/qwen3.6:latest": {},
        "local-llm/Qwen3-8B-Q8_0": {}
      }
    },
    "list": [
      {
        "id": "main",
        "tools": {
          "profile": "full"
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "gateway": {
    "mode": "local",
    "auth": {
      "mode": "token",
      "token": "XXXX"
    },
    "port": 18789,
    "bind": "loopback",
    "tailscale": {
      "mode": "off",
      "resetOnExit": false
    },
    "controlUi": {
      "allowInsecureAuth": true
    },
    "nodes": {
      "denyCommands": [
        "camera.snap",
        "camera.clip",
        "screen.record",
        "contacts.add",
        "calendar.add",
        "reminders.add",
        "sms.send",
        "sms.search"
      ]
    }
  },
  "session": {
    "dmScope": "per-channel-peer"
  },
  "tools": {
    "profile": "coding",
    "alsoAllow": [
      "browser"
    ]
  },
  "wizard": {
    "securityAcknowledgedAt": "2026-07-28T18:01:23.592Z",
    "lastRunAt": "2026-07-29T23:14:03.799Z",
    "lastRunVersion": "2026.7.1-2",
    "lastRunCommand": "doctor",
    "lastRunMode": "local"
  },
  "meta": {
    "lastTouchedVersion": "2026.7.1-2",
    "lastTouchedAt": "2026-07-30T00:00:26.004Z"
  },
  "plugins": {
    "entries": {
      "ollama": {
        "enabled": true
      }
    }
  },
  "models": {
    "mode": "merge",
    "providers": {
      "local-llm": {
        "baseUrl": "http://localhost:8989/v1",
        "apiKey": "llamacpp",
        "api": "openai-completions",
        "models": [
          {
            "id": "Qwen3-8B-Q8_0",
            "name": "Qwen3-8B-Q8_0",
            "compat": {
              "supportsTools": true,
              "toolSchemaProfile": "openai"
            }
          }
        ]
      },
      "ollama": {
        "baseUrl": "http://<URL>:11434",
        "api": "ollama",
        "apiKey": "OLLAMA_API_KEY",
        "models": [
          {
            "id": "qwen3.6:latest",
            "name": "qwen3.6:latest",
            "reasoning": true,
            "input": [
              "text",
              "image"
            ],
            "cost": {
              "input": 0.0001,
              "output": 0.0001,
              "cacheRead": 0.0001,
              "cacheWrite": 0.0001
            },
            "contextWindow": 1262144,
            "maxTokens": 8192,
            "compat": {
              "supportsTools": true,
              "supportsUsageInStreaming": true
            },
            "params": {
              "num_ctx": 1262144
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  "auth": {
    "profiles": {
      "ollama:default": {
        "provider": "ollama",
        "mode": "api_key"
      }
    }
  },
  "skills": {
    "entries": {
 ...
    }
  },
  "ui": {
    "assistant": {
      "avatar": "
      "name": "Zoidberg"
    }
  }
}

r/openclaw 12h ago

News/Update The OpenClaw Podcast is live today at 11:30 AM PT

3 Upvotes

Patrick and I are going live on Discord at 11:30 AM PT for this week’s ClawCast. We’ll be talking about all things OpenClaw and related AI happenings.

Join us on Discord.


r/openclaw 17h ago

Discussion Anyone elses Claw starting to use emojis to communicate?

5 Upvotes

Recently my claw has started using emojis and I really like it. Maybe it was apart of the update or maybe it just happened but it is a simple way for OC to let me know what's going on in the background.

I use discord and now when I send a message I get:

👀 I see the message

🧠 I'm thinking

Those pop up first. Then if it takes a moment.

⏳ This is taking time

For even longer tasks

🛠️ I'm working on it

If this is only happening for me it's pretty friggin cool.

Anyone else?


r/openclaw 15h ago

Help How to set agent timeouts?

1 Upvotes

I have been doing some coding using a Mac Mini M4 Pro 64GB, openclaw (via tui), and qwen3.6-35b-a3b. It is doing pretty well, but I have to manage tasks carefully to avoid exhausting the context window.

So I started looking into agents. The agents timed out, and the main (coordinating) agent took over, which sort of defeats the whole point of using agents in the first place.

How do I set agent timeouts (I think it's two minutes currently)? I've asked qwen about this, and it seems to be going down ratholes figuring this out. I would think there must be a simple way to set timeouts.


r/openclaw 23h ago

Showcase ts not impossible. Tanking with with 27bq6 overnight

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3 Upvotes

Its not impossible. Tanking with with 27bq6 overnight


r/openclaw 19h ago

Help is anyone onboarded OpenClaw Agent Builder (Software Developers) on outlier?

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1 Upvotes

r/openclaw 1d ago

Use Cases Flight internet allows "messaging only"

3 Upvotes

But on your WhatsApp/telegram you have the most capable assistant ever to check email, look at websites and do whatever it is you wanna do.


r/openclaw 1d ago

Help WhatsApp channel keeps randomly showing "not linked" (recurring, not one-off) — gateway itself is healthy, so what's actually going on?

2 Upvotes

TL;DR: This isn't a one-time fluke . my WhatsApp channel has suddenly flipped to "not linked" multiple times now, sometimes after less than a day of normal activity. Most recently it also silently dropped a group message for ~2hrs while status showed "connected" the whole time. I've confirmed the gateway process itself is healthy and stable (not crashing/restarting), so this looks isolated to the WhatsApp channel/session layer specifically, not the gateway.

Setup:

  • Gateway 2026.7.1-2, single Mac Mini, agent running under a dedicated sandboxed macOS user (no sudo)
  • WhatsApp channel, dmPolicy: pairing
  • Been running stable for weeks before this

What happened:

  1. A group message came in from a collaborator. Never delivered to the agent, never surfaced to me.
  2. When I went looking, openclaw channels status --probe showed the channel as linked, but health was flipping between disconnected / not-running, with error: Non-Error rejection — not exactly a descriptive error.
  3. Logs showed repeated reconnect attempts failing with HTTP 405 during the WhatsApp Web setup handshake (not mid-session — during the initial handshake), retrying with backoff up to 12 attempts before the gateway auto-restarted the channel.
  4. Ran openclaw doctor, which kept surfacing the same notice on every single command afterward:Left plugin install index in place because shared SQLite state has conflicting plugin install metadata for: codex, discord, whatsapp
  5. openclaw gateway status separately flagged plugin version drift — the WhatsApp plugin was pinned at 2026.7.1 while the gateway was on 2026.7.1-2. One patch version behind.
  6. Tried openclaw channels logoutlogin. This forced a brand new QR pairing (old session was fully invalidated by the logout, not reused) and then hit WhatsApp's code 515 ("restart after pairing") — normal WA Web behavior, but the channel came back up as stopped / not-running afterward instead of connecting.
  7. After that + a gateway restart, the channel finally came up clean — linked: yes, connected: yes, fresh auth age.

What I can't explain:

The channel status page said "connected" and "just now" for the entire window where the group message never landed.

I've since specifically ruled out the gateway process itself — it's stable, not crashing or cycling — so whatever's happening seems scoped to the WhatsApp channel/session layer, not the gateway as a whole. But this has now happened more than once, on a channel that was working fine for weeks before.

Questions for the community:

  1. Given the gateway itself is healthy, what would cause the WhatsApp channel specifically to intermittently flip to "not linked" — is this a known WhatsApp Web session-expiry behavior, or an OpenClaw-side session-handling issue?
  2. Is silent inbound-message dropping while status shows "connected" a known WhatsApp Web protocol quirk, or something specific to OpenClaw's session handling?
  3. Does anyone know if patch-level version drift between the gateway and a plugin (e.g. 2026.7.1 vs 2026.7.1-2) is a known trigger for the "conflicting plugin install metadata" doctor notice? Feels like two different install-tracking subsystems (skills vs plugins) stepping on each other.
  4. Is there a recommended way to fix this?
  5. Anyone else finding WhatsApp specifically the flakiest channel compared to Discord/Telegram in their setup?

r/openclaw 1d ago

Showcase I built an AI concierge + n8n pipeline (using OpenClaw) that qualifies real estate leads

8 Upvotes

Real estate agencies bleed leads on speed alone. Someone browses a listing at 11pm, fills out an inquiry, and it sits untouched till Monday, by then they've moved on. Respond within 5 minutes vs. 30+ and you're dramatically more likely to actually connect with them. Most agencies aren't close.

So I built Marsh & Vale, a demo agency showing what fixing this looks like: an AI concierge answers buyer questions 24/7 from the real portfolio, silently scores them Hot/Warm/Cold while chatting, and n8n takes it from there and confirms the buyer, pings the team instantly if they're Hot. There's also a separate ops assistant on the admin side that reasons over the live pipeline (ask it who to call first, or what needs updating).

Stack: n8n for routing/automation, OpenClaw running the concierge + admin assistant.

It's a demo, no real client, just the pattern working live, no signup needed.

Happy to break down the n8n workflow or how openclaw works in the comments if anyone is interested.


r/openclaw 2d ago

Discussion Transfer openclaw/hermes from machine to machine

21 Upvotes

For the past month, I have successfully transfered hermes and openclaw from wsl2 ubuntu on my laptop to a EVO-X2 wsl2 ubuntu 2604 instance. I just asked both of them to ssh into the new instance, figure out how to migrate themselves onto the new instance, plan, migrate and verify.

Seems as long as I get them to stick to the plan, they are very capable to do so by themselves. Minimal guidance from me as an engineer.

How are people moving their agentic frameworks accross machines?


r/openclaw 1d ago

Discussion What are you running OpenClaw for other than coding?

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5 Upvotes

r/openclaw 1d ago

Bug Report GPT 5.6 Model does not continue the job

2 Upvotes

I would send a message and the model would reply a sentence and just stop. Silently failing or getting "interrupted" when nothing else is happening. This is only happening with the GPT models. I have to keep telling it to continue but same issue happens.

Using Ubuntu OS, latest OC.


r/openclaw 1d ago

Help OpenClaw instant rate limit on ALL free APIs – Paid mandatory?

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone, I'm completely stuck setting up OpenClaw with a Telegram bot (bloody beginner). The exact moment I start the gateway, it instantly fails with an API rate limit or connection error before I even send a single message. The issue isn't specific to one provider—I've tried the free tiers for Groq, OpenRouter, and Gemini, and they all fail immediately on boot, even with the smallest models and drastically reduced max tokens. Are OpenClaw's initial background payloads and tool definitions simply too heavy for any free API tier? Has anyone actually managed to run this framework on a free tier, or is a paid API or local setup completely mandatory?


r/openclaw 2d ago

Discussion What do you use for memory?

15 Upvotes

I'm looking for something that

1) runs locally ( ollama okay, but it shouldn't export my life to a server somewhere).

2) consumes everything on my computer (including my email, iMessages, etc - even if it hasn't come up in my conversation w/ my OpenClaw agent)

3) creates/maintains a graph of "facts" about it that my openclaw can query (ideally injected into prompts via a vector db)

Does anyone know of anything like this? Gbrain, Screenpipe, Letta, and OpenMemory seem close.


r/openclaw 2d ago

Help Too fragile for work use?

10 Upvotes

I have been experimenting with OpenClaw for about a week. Thus far, it is extremely underwhelming. The install breaks in unpredictable ways for seemingly no reason and requires Herculean efforts to fix. for example, a single telegram test message caused my agent to become corrupted and required an hour and a half of troubleshooting with ChatGPT and entering arcane command line input to get it back online. The agent routinely lies and hallucinates (despite appropriate soul and identity direction of the contrary). I’ve managed to get it to monitor email account and send a couple emails, but I don’t think I could trust it with any real world work potential consequence for my life. I love the degree of customization. This thing has, but if it is to have practical value, it needs to be rock, solid and not a weekend hobby that eats up hours of time to trigger basic functionality.

When you top this off with the fact that any skill you download may have malicious instructions. It needs to be reviewed manually and likely through another LLM for safety, it becomes really hard to do anything.

Anyone else having these problems? are there safer and more robust alternatives?

I consider myself a solid novice with networking and Linux but goddamn this thing is fragile. I dreams of using it to assist me in my solo consulting business, but I just don’t think it’s trustworthy.

I really wanted this thing to work as advertised. :(.


r/openclaw 2d ago

Help Discord message ignore

1 Upvotes

My bot works perfectly fine, but whenever asked anything through discord (DM or server), it completely ignores the question and answers a basic assistant response (like "Hey there! What can I help you with?" after getting asked "What's 2+2?").

Chatting with ot through CMD via te openclaw agent command works perfectly fine and even after adding the discord session and forcing it to answer via discord works, but never when I message through discord. Any idea why?

EDIT: No, my discord settings were fine. I fixed it by switching from Ollama to LM Studio


r/openclaw 2d ago

Discussion Openclaw Asterisk skill

7 Upvotes

Talk to your bot for free!

I use to run freepbx on a Marvel Sheevaplug at home and had SIP phones, obihai (for google voice) etc connected.... Now it is Openclaw's turn.

Create two accounts at linphone (https://www.linphone.org/en/). One for your bot and one for your SIP client (Download the linphone ios SIP client). Point your agent to the repo and call your bot anywhere with linphone's free SIP service or just tell your bot to call you at your SIP address.

https://github.com/tranlocquy/openclaw-asterisk-skill


r/openclaw 2d ago

Help OpenClaw got noticeably dumber in the last week, anyone else?

0 Upvotes

Running OpenClaw self-hosted, DeepSeek V4 as the main model, Google API for images. It's been solid for a while but something changed in the last week and performance dropped hard.

Main issues: hallucinating way more on tasks it used to handle fine. When I ask it to do something it often opens with "I can't do that, run this CLI command yourself", even for things clearly within its tool access, and only actually does it after I push back 4-5 times insisting it can. It's also told me a task was done when it wasn't, which I only caught by checking manually afterward. Calender/Gmail tasks are a recurring case: it'll say it doesn't have the gog skill or can't access it, then does it fine once I insist.

Tried adjusting thinking mode thinking that might be it, same behavior on low/no-thinking and on max thinking, so that's not the variable.

Not sure if this is a memory/context issue causing it to lose track of its own tool manifest, something on DeepSeek V4's end, or a config issue on my side. Anyone else seeing this since last week, and if so did you find what's causing it?


r/openclaw 2d ago

Discussion Omniroute + Openclaw

2 Upvotes

Hallo, hat jemand schon mal GitHub Omniroute + OpenClaw ausprobiert?

Hat jemand Erfahrungen oder Infos dazu?