Frustrating and Fun
Have you ever followed a tutorial, and so many things went wrong, that by the time you got everything working, you have NO IDEA how you did it? No ability to write up the steps or lessons learned to save this pain next time? Yeah, it just happened again to me, but has a cool ending. Stay tuned (and no, a bot didn’t write this, I’m being cheeky myself).
Context rot was at the root of my problem with Betsy, my 3rd attempt at working with OpenClaw. I’m now writing LeeClaw and incorporating the lessons learned. In the mean time, I have KimiClaw, the hosted openclaw that used to suck but appears to have gotten a decent update.
If you talk in one stream for days and weeks on end - EVERYTHING is in one context. And that’s the default behavior. So of COURSE that’s asking for trouble. When I connected Whatsapp, I had a great mobile interface to OpenClaw - but it’s just one continuous context with no way to start fresh or to have multiple threads. So I’m switching to Discord as my interface.
SideNote: The mobile Claude app, when in voice mode, is the first one that doesn’t become stupid just to keep up with conversational speed. So while walking the dog, Claude and I thought through the options and landed on Discord.
Setting up discord to work with OpenClaw is AMAZINGLY OBTUSE. So many steps. SO MANY steps. I thought Cloudflare was bad, this is equally bad if not worse. EVEN WITH AI to guide me, it was an arduous task. At the end, it was all working.
I’m a currently happy camper. I have discord talking to KimiClaw, and I can fire up new threads. I don’t have to mention @KimiClaw every time either (had to at first). Haven’t moved on to voice just yet.
So, after all that pain, and having NO IDEA what all I had to do to get it working - I’m left with “I’d have to suffer again” if I ever needed to repeat this process. And surely I will.
Or will I?
I am living the enhance by AI life. So I had Gemini and KimiClaw write up everything we had done and why. I gave that to Codex to create a Sprint Plan to add Discord to my LeeClaw — AND — write up tutorials. One for connecting Discord to OpenClaw and one for LeeClaw, from the perspective of a technical user who doesn’t know Discord at all.
And now I have two beautiful write ups that will make the next time - if not painLESS - then at least easier.
And now while I take a lunch break and walk the dog again (three times a day) - Codex is adding the Discord feature to LeeClaw!