Why I finally tried OpenClaw (and how I'm making it safe)
For about a year, I avoided giving agents real permissions. Not because I doubted their utility, but because I didn’t trust the blast radius. If an agent can’t do anything meaningful, it’s a toy. If it can do everything, it’s a liability. The useful zone is the uncomfortable middle: enough capability to do real work, inside an environment that is aggressively constrained. OpenClaw is what finally got me across that line. If you haven’t used it, think of it as one operational surface for agent CLI execution, browser control, scheduled jobs, and chat-based control loops. Its bet is CLIs over MCP servers. Agents handle text-based back-and-forth well, and the context cost is way lower than JSON tool schemas. ...