Openai

At the end of March, my OpenClaw setup hit an awkward wall. For a while, Anthropic OAuth access had been good enough for day-to-day agent work. Then access tightened. I do not mean “the model got slightly slower” or “one request had to retry”. I mean the system became unreliable enough that I was pushed toward the API path. That sounded fine in theory. In practice it turned the assistant from a predictable tool into a metered engineering problem. ...

A few weeks ago I wrote about fixing OpenClaw after context bloat and bad model routing. Then I immediately made a related mistake in the opposite direction. I switched the default model to openai/gpt-5.4 and kept the context window at 32,000 tokens. I wanted to test the model on real daily workloads. What I got instead was a week of repeating myself, failing background jobs, and an assistant that felt like it had short-term amnesia. ...

I hit a very predictable failure mode in AI automation: I left the defaults alone for too long. Background jobs accumulated too much context, some of them were still landing on expensive models, and a couple of nightly tasks started timing out. The fix was not dramatic. It was mostly configuration discipline. This was not an OpenClaw bug. It was a bad operating posture. What Broke Four things were interacting badly. ...