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Comment by whicks | Hacker News Reader

I would imagine that this sort of scheduling allows them to have more predictable loads, and they may be hoping that people will schedule some of their tasks in “off hours” to reduce daytime load.

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It also beats OC's heartbeat where it auto-runs every 30 minutes and runs a bunch of prompts to see if it actually needed to run or not.

Man, this just bit me too. I started playing with OC over the weekend (in a VM), and the spend was INSANE even though I wasn't doing anything. I don't see this as very useful as an "assistant" that wanders around and anticipates my needs. But I do like the job system, and the ability to make skills, then run them on a schedule or in response to events. But when I looked into what it was doing behind my back, 48 times a day it was packaging up 20K tokens of silly context ("Be a good agent, be helpful, etc, for 30 paragraphs"), shipping it off to the model, and then responding with a single HEARTBEAT_OK.

Luckily you can turn if off pretty easily, but I don't know why it's on by default to begin with. I guess holdover from when people used it with a $20 subscription and didn't care.

If you want something more lightweight, I made one that has no heartbeat by default: https://stavrobot.stavros.io.

It's very light on token usage in general, as well.

I can recommend Hermes Agent as an alternative to OpenClaw which actually works well, is properly architected, and doesn’t break three times a week.

Oh man... they even have a Nix flake in the repo. That pretty much sells it right there. :D

It’s really, really ridiculous just how many tokens OpenClaw burns when it’s not doing anything.

Also you can schedule it a bit off. Every hour? Delay it a few seconds. Can’t do that with a chat message. Also, batch up a bunch of them, maybe save some compute that way? Latency is not an issue.

I thought about that but I'm pretty sure that if the backlog is automatically clean and I don't need to run my skill for that when I start up in the morning that just means I can do the next task I would have done which will probably use Claude Code.

Your own, personal, Jevons.

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