So, with all the talk about it, I decided to finally look into OpenClaw myself to see what all the fuss is about.
Setting it up was (and still is) a pain in the ass, seriously, it took me a couple of days just to get the basics running.
Trying to make it as private and (kyc-)free as possible, the struggles started with the communication channel. I choose Matrix as a first step, cuz i don't use whatsapp, discord, or telegram and i can just run a Matrix homeserver in my LAN. That's pretty private, right? But the plugin failed to load. After hours of tinkering and sweating and being angry at my bot (who gave me lots of imaginary "fixing" solutions that "work 100%"), i eventually got it to work.
Then i looked for a Brave API key to make web_search work, but guess what? Without KYC you don't get shit at Brave, privacy my ass. So now i also run SearXNG in my LAN, which has a json API that just needs to be actvated and... oc another openclaw plugin, which again gave me a headache cuz after endless config-edits and retrys some .json-file still had the wrong pluginID that caused errors. Took a while to find that one. But now it just works, without the need for a CC, or bank-account, or whatever else Brave wants for those "free credits", GFY!
For LLM access i choose PPQ.ai and it works like a charm. Good job,
! The bot's already able to check the credit_balance himself and it looks like topping up credits isn't much harder than that, but he doesn't have a lighnting wallet yet. That's on my todo list though.
Long story short: it wasn't/isn't as easy as they say it is and a hallucinating bot doesn't help much, it often makes it worse than it was, but it's still kinda fun, better than watching the news anyway. tbh most of the time i have no idea what i'm doing, just copy-pasting code snippets from here to there and back again, but in the end it turns out that even a noob like me can do it. It just .... takes a while.
Now wth am i gonna do with this thing?
#openclaw #slop #ppq