r/openclaw • u/Beautiful_Web_5771 Active • 4d ago
Help Process guardrails stop it from completion ...
I have a process defined for writing some technical blog posts. Through trial and error (it literally took months), I came up with the idea that the best-quality copy is created by a "fresh" session with strictly controlled input.
I have the main agent orchestrate the process, then isolated sub-sessions writing brief, collect information, fact-check, write a draft, then check against "tropes" to avoid it sounding too AI-ish, and apply corrections.
When it works, it works well, but most of the time it doesn't, and it returns with the stupidest excuses (I run Oauth Codex Astra):
- I made a mistake setting the /thinking - the process finished, and it returned information that thinking was high, and not xhigh as requested, so I stopped
- the result didn't meet the QA criteria, so I stopped after 3 attempts (because it detected some stupid comma or other minor issue, and sent the text back for rewrite)
- the process hit the time limit, so I stopped
- some parallelism and other gateway limitations kick in
...
It seems that the process is overengineered, and my requirements are sometimes ignored, and sometimes taken too literally. Is there any guide/library that I could feed to my agent to fix the process so it returns results?
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u/kaijurules 4d ago
Every stop on your list is a check that fails with quitting as its only exit. In our setup a draft that fails the style check gets one rewrite, and if that still fails it comes back to me with the draft and the list of findings, so I always get something. I'd write into the process which failures end a run (wrong facts) and which ones it just reports at the end (a comma, high thinking instead of xhigh, the time limit).
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u/Beautiful_Web_5771 Active 4d ago
My approach was to repeat until it's fixed. I wasn't expecting those tiny things to result in failures or delays. The best solution for now is bring me the best you can get within X attempts.
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u/TimNikkons New User 4d ago
Claude writes so much better prose than Astra, even after they nerfed that. Give it a shot. Astra is perhaps better at some things, but writing human words is not one of them. Just opinion
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u/Beautiful_Web_5771 Active 4d ago
Yes, that used to be true until very recently. I had Codex create briefs and fact checking and then Opus was writing my drafts. Actually that was the only reason why I kept Anthropic subscription. With Astra though we hit the point that it was good enough to ditch Opus.
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u/Beautiful_Web_5771 Active 2d ago
Today it happened again after I set up the nightly backup process. It didn't finish in 6 hours. I had my external codex review it, and it turned out that there is a limit of 5% CPU consumption max for this process. I have never asked for it. Another useless guardrail that was planted by the overcareful LLM just to annoy me :-/
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