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OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

blog.nishantsoni.com

31–40 of 196 posts

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#32
It is an interesting take. I think this is mainly early adoption pains though. This stuff is moving so fast that if you say 'it isn't useful because X isn't good enough' then just wait a month and X will be good enough to find Y as the blocker (or no blockers are left and it truly does become useful). Soon we will see this hooked into the home assistant world well combined with local and remote compute and then we are likely to see real movement.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#34

> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)

somehow I've been able to do that for 40+ years using my brain, eyes, fingers, vi , CLIs and shell scripts. no unsolved problems there.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#35

> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)

> In every case, when you dig deeper, the story is one of two things: either what they built could already be done with standard AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, any decent LLM with a simple integration), or it’s aspirational

All your use cases are fairly well handled by conventional LLM's. OpenClaw is a security nightmare, so it's probably worth switching away.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#36

> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)

None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.

The difference is I would have to do that myself. It has access to gdrive and cc and does it for me when I send it a message in chat. Sometimes when I’m out I even just send it voicys.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#37
The hype around OpenClaw is a bit confusing but I think I figured it out. For most coders, Claude Code in the terminal was an important event. Letting it access code and change files directly. For normal users, they didn’t see the power is that.

OpenClaw runs Pi in a terminal and exposes the chat thru Telegram or any chatting app. This gave the ah-ha moment to non-coders that coders had had for 6+ months prior.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#38

I'm using openclaw as a personal development bot, which is pretty useful. It pings me throughout the day using crons to complete tasks and follows up on them. But aside from that, it is a very unreliable piece of software. I'm constantly having to fix it, or track down correct configurations. It can just decide to randomly edit it's own config, uses incorrect json keys and then the whole thing is dead. Or it blows th…

Amen. I love the concept but I've never hosted such a terrible piece of software. Every update breaks something new or introduces another "anti-feature" that's enabled by default. The documentation is often lagging behind and the changelog has such a low signal to noise ratio that you need a LLM to figure out what upgrading will break this time. For now I've just given up on updates and I've been patching bugs direct…

I know Twitter has been talking up Hermes Agent by Nous Research a lot or id recommend building your own agent off of Pi.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#39

I do feel like the memory the biggest hurdle I’ve been encountering and I’m curious what solutions people have been doing to make it work. What seems to be somewhat working for me 1. Karpathy wiki approach 2. some prompting around telling the llm what to store and not. But it still feels brittle. I don’t think it’s just a retrieval problem. In fact I feel like the retrieval is relatively easy. It’s the write part, ge…

its almost as if its rules should be persisted, versioned and tested in a deterministic way. I also wonder if it might end up useful to try enforcing some kind of constraints to data (memory) itself. like if we could enforce atomicity, consistency, isolation AND durability. and transparency so no place for malware to hide. and deterministic execution, from fully reproducible builds...

er, nevermind. prob just crazy castles in the sky wistful dreams :-)

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