r/openclaw

I've been using OpenClaw for a while now to manage about five websites, a mix of WordPress, Astro and Eleventy, together with Claude Code and Codex.

Overall, I'm really pleased with it. It's become genuinely useful for managing and working across several sites, and I like being able to use different coding agents depending on the task.

But there's one thing that has become a real pain point: updates.

It feels like almost every time I update OpenClaw, something breaks or stops working as expected. I've had enough issues after upgrades that I'm now genuinely scared to update a setup that's working.

I'm curious about other OpenClaw users: do you update as soon as a new version comes out, or do you deliberately stay a few versions behind? Have you found a reliable way to update without breaking your setup?

Apart from that, my experience has been very positive. I just wish upgrading didn't feel like rolling the dice every time.

New to this. I took a little training and then created an AI agent and put it in a sandbox in a VPS. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I would like to get it started on recovering my expenses so far and into the future but I don’t want to jump the gun. What should be my next steps with the assistant?

Previously I said we expected to release today, August 18, but it will not be going out today.

Testing is still uncovering issues with fresh installations and, most importantly, upgrades from v2026.7.1 and earlier. We are not waiting for perfection, but we need confidence that existing users can upgrade without breaking their setups.

We are close, but I will not set another exact day until the final checks are clear.

Sorry about the delay and thank you so much for your patience.

I run openclaw 2026.6.9 with Qwen 3.8 27B on llama.cpp

As Qwen 3.8 controls it’s thinking levels with the chat template there wasn’t out of the box support on my stack, so my claw wrote this plugin and I asked him to make it public just in case someone else finds it useful.

What it does:
* Propagates thinking levels correctly on the chat template per api call
* optionally it lets you set a different level for heartbeats (I use it with xhigh)
* instruct mode (thinking off) supports changing sampling parameters as recommended by unsloth
* optionally force compaction to instruct mode to prevent timeouts.

Repo is here. Fully written by my claw, I didn’t even look at the code: gitlab.com/moltwithhat/llamacpp-qwen-thinking

Been using Deep Seek as my primary model. Switched from OpenAI and Gemini because I was racking up a bill. For daily tasks it’s actually been great. Even coding tbh. It’s also been dirt cheap. Anyway just wanted to put it out there in case people haven’t tried it yet.

Hi all! I wanna check what type of free model is best for OpenClaw? As I'm trying out and wanna use telegram as my way of communication. Any good suggestions? I saw kimi is one of them. Any other suggestions?

Love to hear your feedback on the models too!

Thanks in advance!

It's unfortunately incredibly vague and just says there was activity under my codex account that was flagged as Cyber Abuse. Unfortunately it doesn't specify or provide a pathway to get more information.

The ONLY thing I can think of was I was using my agent to update account details of social media accounts that I own/manage. Im really not sure beyond that. At least my account isnt banned.

Hi everyone,

Are there any alternatives to Google Workspace? I’m thinking of something like Openclaw connecting—via OAuth—a Samsung S24 to OpenAI Codex...

Earlier today, I said, "Hey Google, can you send me an email with this subject and this text... and then add an appointment to my calendar?" etc.

The response was that I’d need to set up Google Workspace... ...and I don't really want to spend money on that.

20260819 I don't see a resolved or closed tag I could add but bottom line my arch nemesis, assumptions, reared it's ugly head and exasperated this problem. I had workspace pointing to a different directory than all the workspace files I created. Once I corrected that and restarted gateway those .md files were processed, applied and the BOOTSTRAP.md file removed. Also MEMORY.md was generated with info from the bootstraping.

I'm trying to use openclaw in a well provisioned pve trixie vm. I let curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash install node in userspace. I configured the model using my dedicated lenovo p920 trixie with rtx 3090 dedicated to compute as ollama server with qwen2.5-coder.7b as the model. This process didn't seem to kickoff the onboarding but I fired it off with openclaw onboard --clasic (I'm not sure it completed as I saw some log errors about missing taiscale. I don't need tailscale in this vm it can reach the ollama server just fine on the same /24.) My very first chat resulted in the error.

This image shows how often I get this message.

A bit more background I had another vm running the same configuration successfully for more than a day with some long chats and some skill creation with the workbench flow as well as the ha-mcp mcp up. Eventually it came up with this same problem. once I see that COMPACTED HISTORY message no further chatting completes. Hence the attempt at a clean install on a new vm without any awareness of previous installs.

On both installs there was no default / templated MEMORY.md

https://preview.redd.it/2xs99sy3yzjh1.png?width=2161&format=png&auto=webp&s=0582ee0cf268f37eecabdab68ae5812470e66831

im completely new to openclaw, so i went to the official site to install it and copied the terminal command, then in the terminal the onboarding said there is no menu and just to tell it what i need, so i thought sweet, this is going to be easy, i dont need to figure out which options i need, so i typed yes to start using it, but it just kept saying no provider, i quickly figured out i had to connect an ai model myself, which is fine, but its still annoying i have to do extra stuff during the install, like just install the thing, so i ran ollama, but still it cant see it, and since its an ai model, i dont know exactly what to do, like do i talk to it, do i fix something somewhere else, so i had to go to ai to help me set it up, and thats another layer of annoyance because something that needs extra help when its supposed to be just a simple installer really hits my nerves, i kept trying to set it up, but it just wouldnt work, then the ai model recommended using --classic, and that not only worked flawlessly, but was even faster without any issues

i know this rant is too much for just an installer, but it annoys me that it was more complex and time consuming than i expected, and not only that, but there was already a faster and simpler option hidden away that i had to dig through the docs just to find

so in short just leave the --classic installer on official site so no poor soul suffers like me

Not launching anything in this thread. Question for people who have let their agent pay for something (x402, USDC, a paid skill, whatever):

what has it paid for more than once, and why did it keep paying instead of doing the job itself?

Looking for repeat spend, not first-try novelty. If yours has never paid for anything, that's a useful answer too — most don't.

OpenClaw vs Vibe coding -

For personal tools, I no longer vibe code, i ask my agent, usually with a 5min voice message to build, test and deploy it for me. My mom recently asked me for an app - i asked her for a voice message to forward to my agent.

For websites, we recently released a new tool with a fresh site, and it was mixed - design happened in Figma + claude design, implementation in Claude Code - and maintenance now happens over Slack with our marketing agent (change copy, meta, cta, navigation items, publishing blog posts).

Some of our agents don’t code directly, the operate a local Codex / Claude Code.

Do you still vibe code, or does openclaw removed that need?

Planning to set up openclaw within 2 days and doing research on how the other pro users have set it up.

I have seen a few options using hostinger and self hosting, etc.

If people can chime in with their thoughts along with some pros and cons I would be very appreciative of the advice and input

Edit 1: I will be using ChatGPT oAuth to use the same ChatGPT subscription I usually pay for. Not sure if Claude is available as oAuth here or not.

been using openclaw for a few weeks now and the single chat thread thing is starting to drive me nuts. whether its the web ui or telegram, everything just dumps into one long conversation. i have work stuff, personal automations, side project ideas - all mashed into the same chat.

is there something out there (skill, fork, wrapper, anything) that gives you like a simple app where you can:

see all your sessions in one place

create separate projects or workspaces

switch between different chats without losing context

i know multi-agent routing exists but thats not really what im talking about. i dont need five different agents, i just want to organize my conversations with one agent the way you'd organize folders or projects. like how cursor or claude code has different projects.

telegram especially is rough for this. its basically a single thread that keeps growing forever. tried /new but then good luck finding that old session where you set something up two weeks ago.

anyone figured out a decent workflow for this or is everyone just vibing with one mega-thread? would genuinely pay for a clean simple app that just does this.

Today I asked Skippy (my OC partner in crime) to use qwen3.8-27 and create JARVIS, a fully customized fork of OpenClaw running entirely on local models.

What blew me away:

1. It actually worked — completely standalone gateway
2. Two versions of OpenClaw now running side-by-side on my M2 Ultra (both fighting for the same GPU resources 😅)
3. Zero cloud dependency, all local inference
4. I can customize everything without touching the original install

The process was simpler than expected. Skippy handled the heavy lifting — renaming packages, updating configs, managing state directories. The whole thing took minutes, not hours.

What's exciting to me isn't just that it works, but that this is accessible now. You don't need a team of engineers or massive infrastructure. One person with a decent Mac and some local models can build their own AI gateway.

The wild part? Running two versions simultaneously on the same machine. Both want the GPU, both have their own state dirs, both are trying to do their thing. But it works — and that's what gets me excited about this tech.

Anyone else experimenting with self-hosted forks or local-only setups? Would love to hear how you're handling resource conflicts between multiple AI systems.