The Night OpenClaw Completely Ghosted Me: My Real Headache Story as a Kolkata AI Agent Engineer

Source: Dev.to

Background

I’m Aniruddha Adak, a final‑year B.Tech CSE student at BBIT Kolkata and a full‑time AI Agent Engineer. After sharing the 30 wins that made OpenClaw my go‑to sidekick, I promised to also talk about the messy, frustrating side of the tool.

The Night OpenClaw Failed Me

It was around 11 PM IST. I was working on an AI‑agent experiment that needed to:

1. Scrape public data about the latest Ollama model releases.
2. Organize the data into a clean Markdown table saved as results.md.
3. Commit the file with the message “Updated Ollama models – April 2026” and push to a private GitHub repository.

I sent the following prompt over WhatsApp:

Prompt
“Run a full web research on the latest Ollama model releases, compile them into a clean table in results.md, commit it with message ‘Updated Ollama models - April 2026’, and push to my private repo. Use exec tools only. Confirm each step.”

OpenClaw replied instantly:

Got it, Aniruddha! Starting research now… ✅

What Actually Happened

For the next 45 minutes I received only half‑hearted updates such as:

• “Browsing sites…”
• “Compiling table…”
• “Almost done…”

When I checked the repository, results.md was missing, no commit existed, and nothing had been pushed.

I tried again with an even more specific prompt, but the pattern repeated: the agent accepted the task, sent placeholder messages, and then went silent.

Error Messages

The night was punctuated by the same error appearing at least twelve times:

Failed to call a function. Please adjust your prompt. See 'failed_generation' for more details.

Even after switching from Claude to a local model, the error persisted.

At one point the agent explicitly said:

“I cannot execute commands, I have no exec tool”

…despite having enabled full elevated tool access in the configuration and confirming it in the gateway dashboard.

Troubleshooting Attempts

I tried a series of “nuclear” fixes:

# Restart the gateway
openclaw gateway restart

# Run the built‑in doctor command
openclaw doctor --fix

# Clear the current session
/openclaw new

# Roll back to an older version
openclaw version rollback 

None of these steps resolved the issue. The agent would still accept the task, appear to work, and then either hang or return empty placeholder replies.

By 3 AM I had burned through a large number of tokens due to the relentless retry loop, and the project remained incomplete.

Community Findings

The next morning I searched Reddit and found many users reporting the same problems:

• Updates breaking exec tools overnight – see /r/openclaw
• “Failed to call a function” becoming the most common error – see /r/clawdbot
• Agents promising execution but never actually running shell commands or git pushes – see /r/AI_Agents
• Infinite retry loops that silently drain API budgets

These reports confirmed that the failures were not isolated to my setup.

Lessons Learned

After the ordeal I distilled three hard‑earned lessons:

1. Start a fresh session (/new) before any important task. Stale context can silently break tool calling.

2. Double‑check tool permissions in openclaw.json after every update. The combination "ask": "off" and "security": "full" saved me later. Example snippet:

   {
     "tools": {
       "exec": {
         "enabled": true,
         "security": "full"
       }
     },
     "ask": "off"
   }

3. Never trust the agent 100 % on autopilot. Human oversight remains mandatory, especially for operations that touch Git or the terminal.

These insights forced me to dig deeper into OpenClaw’s internals, tighten safeguards (cost guardians, sandbox checks), and adopt a more defensive workflow.

Conclusion

OpenClaw remains the most powerful personal agent I’ve used—when it works, it feels magical. When it doesn’t, the experience is painful, but those pain points drive real improvements in both the tool and its users.

If you’ve experienced a similar “lobster ghosted me” moment, feel free to share your story in the comments.

— Aniruddha Adak, Kolkata, West Bengal, India (April 17 2026)