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

Hey DEV Community 👋

I’m ANIRUDDHA ADAK (@aniruddhadak on X), final-year B.Tech CSE student at BBIT Kolkata and a full-time AI Agent Engineer who lives and breathes this stuff.

After my last post about the 30 wins that made OpenClaw my 24/7 lobster-powered sidekick , I promised myself I’d also share the messy, frustrating, headache-inducing side. Because let’s be real — no tool is perfect, especially one that’s still growing fast.

This is the raw, first-person story of the night OpenClaw straight-up failed me, ignored my commands, threw ridiculous errors, and left me staring at my screen at 2 AM in my Kolkata room wondering why I trusted a lobster with my workflow.

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It started simple enough.

I was deep in a side project — one of my AI agent experiments that needed to scrape some public data, organize it into a clean Markdown file, and push it to a private GitHub repo. I had done similar tasks before and OpenClaw had nailed them. So I fired up WhatsApp at around 11 PM IST and typed a clear, detailed 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.”

The lobster replied instantly with its usual confidence:

“Got it, Aniruddha! Starting research now… ✅”

Then… nothing.

For the next 45 minutes it kept sending half-hearted updates like:

“Browsing sites…”

“Compiling table…”

“Almost done…”

But when I checked my repo? Empty. No results.md. No commit. Nothing.

I tried again, this time even more specific. Same thing. It would promise, loop, and ghost me.

Then came the error that made me want to throw my laptop out the window.

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

I saw that message pop up in WhatsApp at least 12 times that night. No matter how I rephrased the command, it kept failing the tool call. I even switched from Claude to a local model — same nonsense.

At one point it literally told me:

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

…even though I had explicitly enabled full elevated tool access in the config and confirmed it in the gateway dashboard. Classic.

I tried the nuclear option — restarted the gateway, ran openclaw doctor --fix, cleared the session with /new, even rolled back to an older version. Still nothing. It would accept the task, act like it was working, then either hang or give placeholder replies with zero actual execution.

By 3 AM I had burned through way more tokens than I care to admit (the retry loop was ruthless), my head was pounding, and my once-exciting agent project was now just sitting there mocking me.

I finally gave up, did the task manually in 20 minutes, and went to sleep frustrated.

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The next morning I dug into Reddit (r/openclaw, r/clawdbot, r/AI_Agents) and realized I wasn’t alone. Tons of people were posting about the exact same pain:

• Updates breaking exec tools overnight
• “Failed to call a function” becoming the most common error
• Agents promising the world but never actually running shell commands or git pushes
• Infinite retry loops that quietly drain your API budget

It wasn’t just me. OpenClaw was still early, and these kinds of silent failures and ignored commands were hitting a lot of us.

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But here’s the part that still keeps me hooked: even after that nightmare night, I didn’t uninstall it.

I learned three hard lessons that night:

1. Always start a fresh session (/new) before important tasks — old context can silently break tool calling.
2. Double-check tool permissions in openclaw.json after every update (the “ask: off” + “security: full” combo saved me later).
3. Never trust it 100% on autopilot yet. Human oversight is still mandatory, especially for anything that touches git or the terminal.

That headache actually made me a better AI builder. It forced me to understand the internals, read the config deeper, and set up better safeguards (like cost guardians and sandbox checks).

OpenClaw is still the most powerful personal agent I’ve used — when it works, it feels magical. But when it doesn’t… it really doesn’t.

And that’s okay. That’s how real tools grow.

If you’ve had your own “lobster ghosted me” moment, drop it in the comments. My OpenClaw is (hopefully) reading them right now.

Exfoliate! Exfoliate! 🦞 (even on the bad days)

— ANIRUDDHA ADAK

Kolkata, West Bengal, India | April 17, 2026

(X: @aniruddhadak — I test every AI agent so you don’t have to)

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This is a separate companion post for the OpenClaw Challenge (Wealth of Knowledge track). The shiny 30-experience version is my love letter. This one is the honest truth.

Both sides make the full picture.

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Thanks, happy building ...