How I use Tavily and Exa alongside Brave Search in my OpenClaw AI agent stack — what each does, when to use which, step-by-step install guide, and the security guardrails you need to run external search APIs safely.
Self-hosted personal finance tracking without screen scraping or SaaS subscriptions. This guide walks through connecting Firefly III to U.S. banks via SimpleFIN Bridge, configuring the Data Importer correctly, and automating daily sync with OpenClaw.
I moved 18 OpenClaw cron jobs from cloud models to local Devstral Small 2 in one night. Here’s the exact commands, the gotchas (reasoning:false matters), and the final model routing stack — with real cost impact.
I removed the @mem0/openclaw-mem0 plugin after discovering five critical bugs in v0.1.2: eager SDK imports, silent memory discard, broken local embeddings, SQLite arm64 failures, and a memory monopoly that disabled my existing setup. Here’s what I replaced it with — and the Node version nightmare that came with it.
After a week-long incident with my self-hosted AI gateway, here’s what I rebuilt: LaunchAgent watchdog, config backups, graceful restart handling, and the five things that make a gateway actually resilient.
How I built a heartbeat monitoring system for a self-hosted AI agent — cron health checks, status escalation, cost anomaly detection, and alerting before things break badly.
30 days of running a self-hosted AI agent non-stop — what broke, what surprised me, the real token costs, and the operational lessons nobody talks about. An honest field report.