installed OpenClaw today to build a Telegram bot for MTV REWIND. i had my doubts going in — the security concerns are well documented and when something gets this much hype this fast it usually means the marketing outpaced the engineering. but i'm a builder. i had to see for myself.
the good: initial setup was smooth. telegram connected, bot responded in character, personality was great. the terminal one-liners are genuinely funny. i get the charm.
the bad: i tried to change the model from Opus to Haiku because responses took 1-2 MINUTES each. this is where i lost 3 hours of my life.
changed the config JSON. restarted. still Opus. ran the configure wizard. selected Haiku. restarted. still Opus. turns out the wizard auto-selects both models and you have to spacebar to deselect — nobody tells you this. fixed that. restarted. still Opus. grepped the config directory. found a hidden "primary" field still pointing to Opus. deleted it. restarted. still Opus. found a cached session file with Opus hardcoded. deleted it. gateway crashed. reinstalled the LaunchAgent. restarted. still Opus. corrupted the JSON once in nano. restored from backup. restarted. still Opus.
the config system is essentially decorative.
Opus is hardcoded as the fallback default. when OpenClaw can't resolve your model choice — which is often — it just falls back to Opus.
there is no escaping the lobster trap.
the gateway crashed roughly 15 times. "unreachable (timeout)" is its favorite status. the doctor --fix command quietly overwrites your manual config changes. eventually got an API overload error because Opus is expensive and slow to serve. 1-2 minute response times for a chatbot. unusable.
uninstalled the whole thing — gateway service, state, config, workspace, macOS app. building the same bot in ~50 lines of Node.js with the Telegram API and Anthropic SDK directly. same personality. model i actually want. deploys to Railway. responds in 2 seconds not 2 minutes.
the infrastructure is held together with vibes and lobster emoji.
the gap between the hype and the engineering is wider than the Grand Canyon. OpenClaw is the most charming broken thing i've ever used. the branding is A+. the product is not.
no hate to Peter Steinberger — he captured something real with the concept. but he just left for OpenAI and handed the project to a foundation, so if you're thinking about building on this... maybe wait.
my advice: if you want an AI bot on Telegram or Discord, just build it directly. it's genuinely less code than fighting the OpenClaw config system. and your bot will actually use the model you tell it to. 🦞
