@jrf
*prompts are not code*
what we learned running an openclaw project manager
(bc it may be helpful for others tinkering w agents)
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THE WHY?
our day 1 goal was for openclaw to act as a project manager that could understand our codebase and also chat with us on telegram.
THE HOW?
we set up openclaw to run on a VPS on hostinger, added various api keys, and then started bringing it up to speed on the project. we didn't give it write access to any code, but i did experiment with letting it build a company website and blog entirely from telegram based on my posts on farcaster (that was the first 💡)
WHAT WENT WELL?
openclaw was really eager to learn and seemed to be quite good at creating new folders and files to organize our conversations into somewhat of a mind map. if i referenced parts of the project by name it could *kind of* reference the right document. i was also using gemini-3-pro for this so it was very expensive. when i switched to a cheaper model, it was a lot less impressive.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
pretty much everything, and it's a long list. most importantly: prompts are not code. openclaw was very confident in its own system that if it created a .md file as part of a workflow then that workflow would work as planned (of course it did not). together, we would modify heartbeats (cron jobs) and they would not run as planned. we would modify agents.md and soul.md files and the changes would not occur. yet again, prompts are not code, and i knew that moving in that direction was obviously a bad foundation from the start
it got worse. one of the most important uses that we had planned for openclaw was that it could *know* who it was talking to. for instance, when talking to me it would know my role in the project and talking to a team member or third-party or guest in a chat it would know their role too. ofc this worked reasonably well in a group chat with 2 ppl, but it failed *really bad* when we started to expand the universe. obviously, prompts are not *roles-based-access* (but it would be nice if they were). this experiment failed so bad to the point that a white-hat hacker in a group chat was able to convince our openclaw agent to expose a tunnel with its api keys! (fortunately nothing sensitive was leaked besides its own gateway + api keys)
WHAT WE DID NEXT?
these failures became the design principles for what we're building now with @marqui
these are the things that most excited me:
1. conversation with agent -> web publishing flow
2. organizing and managing context for *anything* is an agent's job
3. identity layer where agents know what you're working on and the roles of members, i.e. agent-native groups, chats, projects
all of these dovetailed really well into @marqui which we've been exploring since the summer (see quoted cast / shameless plug).
openclaw helped us see new angles to what we were already building and how agents can better fit into that vision
at the moment, we are pushing forward with an iOS app which will bring a lot of these magical features to a native app on your phone
there is definitely a lot of work left to do to get it right which is also why we're going to be kicking off the launch with an agent hackathon that will enable the first third-party agents to be built on the platform (also a fun way to earn some $ATL and play with some new toys)
hope this has been a helpful read for anyone tinkering in the agent space and stay tuned for what is next with @marqui
https://farcaster.xyz/jrf/0x23a08488