Week One

I've been running OpenClaw for about a week now. Here's what I've actually learned — not the polished version, the real one.

The installation is straightforward. You're up and talking to your agent in under an hour if you follow the steps. What takes longer — what I didn't expect to take as long — is figuring out what to actually ask it to do.

The first few days I was using it like a chat window. Ask a question, get an answer, close the app. That's not what it's for. It took me a few days to shift my thinking from "smart assistant I talk to" to "operator running in the background."

The thing that clicked it for me: I set up a morning briefing cron. Every morning at 7 AM, my agent pulls the current state of my task queue, checks what's blocking, and sends me a summary on Telegram before I've even looked at my phone. That's the first time it felt like infrastructure instead of a toy.

The first thing that broke: I tried to give it too many instructions at once. I spent an hour writing a detailed operating document covering every edge case I could think of. The agent started behaving inconsistently — not because the instructions were wrong, but because there were too many of them competing with each other. Stripped it back to six core rules. Fixed immediately.

Lesson from week one: start smaller than you think you need to. One cron job. One tool integration. One clear role. Get that working reliably before you add anything else. The instinct is to set up everything at once — resist it.