OpenClaw

Why it is on this list

It grew faster than maintainers could keep the code steady. The main repo has about 6,600 open issues. Upgrades often break plugins. Agents that look fine in demos fail in daily use: the gateway dies, cron does not fire, memory drops, tasks say done when nothing finished. Security is concrete too: a one-click remote code execution is recorded as CVE-2026-25253. Marketing talks about an always-on operator. The public record is mostly outages and incidents.

References (10)

• openclaw/openclaw repository stats

  GitHub

  Public star and issue counts make the quality gap measurable (~380k stars vs multi-thousand open issues).

• CVE-2026-25253 — one-click RCE via gatewayUrl WebSocket

  NVD

  NVD entry for token exfiltration through automatic WebSocket connection from a crafted query string (pre-2026.1.29).

• DepthFirst write-up of 1-click RCE

  DepthFirst

  Original research on stealing gateway auth and turning it into remote code execution.

• runZero advisory on OpenClaw RCE

  runZero

  Summarizes unauthenticated one-click RCE impact and affected versions.

• Personal AI agents are a security nightmare

  Cisco Blogs

  Cisco research on malicious skills, exfiltration, and prompt-injection paths in the ecosystem.

• OpenClaw starts fun, then the headaches

  X / @rileybrown · May 4, 2026

  Power users report gateway issues, cron not firing, skills flaking, memory fall-off, re-auth loops.

• Still not production grade after the commit storm

  X / @_brandonbrown_ · Jul 23, 2026

  Returned after waiting for stability; basic tasks still fail silently and latency kills conversation.

• Demo worked, production did not

  X / @georgeorch · Apr 23, 2026

  Weeks lost to context loss and dropped instructions before abandoning the stack.

• Hygiene meme — thousands of open issues and vulns

  X · Mar 10, 2026

  Viral snapshot of open issue/PR and vulnerability counts used as evidence of unmanaged quality.

• Where OpenClaw Breaks (field guide)

  r/openclaw

  Operator notes that external integrations break regularly through auth failures and related modes.

Related entries

• 当皇上 (Dang Huang Shang)

  当皇上 (wanikua/danghuangshang) is an OpenClaw tutorial and config pack. With one command it tries to turn Discord or Feishu into a Ming-style court: cabinet, six ministries, and more if you want. The pitch says five minutes to start, eighteen-plus agents, sixty-plus skills.

• Edict

  Edict runs on OpenClaw and lines agents up like an imperial court: three departments, six ministries, and a live board. The repo is cft0808/edict, mostly Python. A few months after create, GitHub had about sixteen thousand stars. Marketing often sets it next to CrewAI and AutoGen.

• Zerolang

  Zerolang is an experimental Vercel Labs language meant for agents. The semantic graph is treated as the program itself, and .0 files are a human-readable projection. Agents are supposed to patch graph nodes instead of fighting line-based text diffs. The pitch includes native binaries and agent-friendly diagnostics. Host backend quality is still uneven.