Couldn't agree more - tried to convince a business that doubling down on OpenClaw wasn't going to solve problems except for some 0-1 stuff, and that almost immediately they'd run into roadblocks because most of the product wouldn't serve their use case.

4 months of mostly spinning their wheels later they launched a really lackluster OC product that's effectively DOA.

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tcdent 5 days ago | parent [-]

OpenClaw is an application, not a harness. Yes, it contains a harness, but it is a complete product.

When building an agentic workflow there are enough primitives that rewriting them from scratch every time makes zero sense.

What is a tool? How does the LLM understand the tool? Formatting a native function into a serializable input/output pattern makes sense to generalize and that does not need to exist repeated in everyones application code.

We use libraries to interact with the APIs themselves; nobody would say writing a spec-compliant API client was poor practice. Agentic harnesses are just one layer above: I need to call the API and I need to do it with certain expected conventions.

	▲	hilariously 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but that seems liked two different points. One, obviously yes OC contains a lot more than a harness, but my point was that it was too much for their use case and constrained their choices, not enabled them, and that choosing the right layer of abstraction is important. There's good indirection/abstraction and there's ones that do not serve your use case, eg what was obviously day one regarding Langchain.