13 Weeks with OpenClaw as Daily Driver: What Worked, What Broke, What Still Hurts

After 13 weeks of running OpenClaw as his primary personal agent system on a Raspberry Pi — handling Telegram chat, long-term memory, cron jobs, subagents, research workflows, and external APIs — one r/openclaw user posted a detailed recap. The verdict: OpenClaw is powerful enough to treat as infrastructure, but still rough enough that you need patience, logs, backups, and a willingness to debug weird edge cases.

What Worked Well

• Workflow layering. The agent sits between messaging, files, crons, APIs, memory, and tools. The cron system is genuinely useful — recurring jobs collect, process, summarize, notify, and trigger follow-up workflows. Once tuned, they become boring in the good sense.
• Memory — if curated. OpenClaw can remember decisions, project state, preferences, mistakes, and prior fixes. But letting every raw fragment into long-term memory turns it into sludge. With cleanup and project-specific memory files, it becomes a real operating layer.
• Subagents for bounded tasks. Most useful pattern: human decides direction, main agent coordinates, subagents do bounded analysis or implementation, main agent verifies. Less useful when context is vague or model/config routing is not explicit.
• Continuity. The biggest success is not one feature — it's that the system now handles operational memory, scheduled checks, recurring analysis, technical debugging, config reviews, small code changes, and structured follow-up daily.

What Broke or Annoyed

• Model/config issues. Early on, local/small model setups (e.g., 4k context) couldn't handle OpenClaw's system prompt plus tools. “Assistant turn failed” errors often traced back to API key/config problems, not RAM.
• Cron + subagent interaction gap. Scheduled workflows spawned a subagent that did work correctly, but the parent couldn't read child output because agent-to-agent history was disabled. Fix: redesign so the child writes results directly (write —file) instead of relying on parent readback.
• Shell quoting. Passing JSON through shell commands broke on apostrophes and nested quoting. Fix: write JSON to a temp file and pass --file.
• Update drift. OpenClaw updates improved startup performance and memory pressure on the Pi, but update days required caution — config drift, ACP command drift, docs drift. Had to check what actually changed rather than trusting all was fine.
• Subagent model override. Defaults were not always respected; now passes model/agent IDs explicitly.
• ACP unreliability. Claude ACP via OpenClaw failed with internal runtime errors; direct ACP/CLI paths worked.
• Secrets/config hygiene. OpenClaw supports structured SecretRefs, but old config/auth-profile files can still contain plaintext secrets. Migrating safely requires backups, schema checks, and rollback planning.
• Resource pressure on Pi. Long-running Claude/Codex processes, crons, and memory artifacts accumulate. Added cleanup routines; archived a dead project that had grown to ~1.6 GB of regenerable bloat.

Who It's For

Developers running OpenClaw as a personal agent system — especially on constrained hardware — who want a ground-truth account of real-world pain points and practical workarounds.