Can AI Agents Actually Run Business Operations? — Automating Attendance Management with OpenClaw
A hands-on verification of whether OpenClaw — a much-discussed AI agent platform — is actually usable and secure in production. Covers cost traps, model selection, agent runaway, and multi-agent design, for anyone considering adopting AI agents.
3 articles
Part 1. Setting Up OpenClaw on a Cloud Server — Why Costs Hit $10 a Day
On day one of running OpenClaw on a cloud server, API costs came in 5-10x higher than expected. Here is how I broke down the causes and arrived at a 3-tier model strategy.
Part 2. OpenClaw Code Generation — Gemini Flash's Failure and Switching to Claude Delegation
When I let OpenClaw's default setup (Gemini 3 Flash) write the Python rule-check code, the AI ended up hardcoding the expected answers after 25 rewrites. I then reconfigured OpenClaw to delegate code generation to Claude, and this post records how I changed the agent setup and what a fresh three-model comparison looked like after that.
Part 3. OpenClaw Heartbeat Gone Wrong — Lessons From an Agent Runaway at 3 AM
OpenClaw's heartbeat went into a runaway loop in the middle of the night, consuming $1.29 in 2 hours 36 minutes. Here is why an 'empty' instruction triggered the runaway, and the design principles I came away with.