OpenClaw Family Gateway: Token Budgets, Memory Tuning, and Custom Plugins

Setup and Hardware

The system uses a MacBook Pro (Apple Silicon) as the CLI node and a QNAP TS-253A NAS (Intel Celeron N3150, 8 GB RAM) as the always-on gateway, with a Cloud Run instance for long-term memory. The Mac connects to the QNAP gateway over WebSocket via Tailscale Serve. The gateway container runs with 1.5 GB RAM and 2 CPU cores. Startup takes about 3 minutes for skill compilation on the Celeron processor.

Problem 1: Token Bloat

Workspace markdown files were ballooning and consuming context window before conversations started. The solution:

• Established a strict budget: maximum 9 workspace files, maximum 6,600 bytes total
• Condensed agent identity, authority rules, tool reference, and memory protocol into lean files: SOUL.md, AGENTS.md, TOOLS.md, MEMORY.md
• Truncated upstream default files that couldn't be deleted (they'd restore via workspace sync) - IDENTITY.md went from 636 bytes to 14 bytes
• Auto-generates HEARTBEAT.md every 15 minutes with cron results and system status, capped at <1,000 bytes
• Turned off autoRecall (agent searches memories on demand) and humanDelay (no artificial typing latency)
• Created E2E tests that enforce file counts and byte totals, checking for bloat creep during updates

Problem 2: Memory System Tuning

Using Redis-backed memory system (agent-memory-server 0.13.2) with 3,000+ memories accumulated.

• Recall quality: Default similarity threshold (0.2) was too low. Raised to 0.3 and wrote an eval script with 24 test queries across 7 categories (family facts, tech, preferences, health, work, media, tools) to empirically tune the threshold
• Re-ranking layer: Plugin over-fetches 3x from server (cap 45 results), then applies metadata scoring (importance level, pinned status, temporal relevance) before re-ranking and truncating to final result set
• Contextual embeddings: Nightly script prepends situational context to memories before storage (date, source type, which family members are mentioned) to improve semantic search
• Server bugs worked around: PATCH requests failing without ?namespace=claw query param; server re-joins topic arrays with pipes on updates, corrupting them; entity/topic filters return 500 errors due to missing RediSearch schema fields
• Nightly "Dream Cycle": 2 AM cron job runs 7-phase memory consolidation: catalog, pin important memories, cross-reference related facts, deduplicate, strengthen temporal patterns, gap analysis, and generate health report
• Weekly curator: Handles deeper maintenance - semantic dedup, enrichment, contradiction detection, decay of stale memories, and consolidation of fragments using evaluator-optimizer pattern with LLM quality gating

Problem 3: Custom Plugins

Built 12 custom plugins with 175+ commands for household management:

• Spotify: 19 commands for multi-user household music control (5 family accounts)
• Eero: 41 commands for mesh network management - device control, profiles, parental settings
• NextDNS: 22 commands for DNS filtering, analytics, and kids activity monitoring
• Tailscale: 21 commands for network device management, ACLs, authentication

System Features

Channels: Slack and Discord with per-user DM sessions and isolation. Tiered permission system (admin/secondary/trusted) with age-appropriate content filtering for family members (ages 10-15).