OpenAI OAuth Success Story - Coming from Kimi and Minimax

My experience with Openclaw genuinely improved today so I thought I'd share.

For context: I closed my OpenAI plus account late last year out of frustration with poor performance and constant glazing through the chatgpt app. I was done and honestly hated the ChatGPT model.

After starting up Openclaw in mid Feb, the negative experience with OpenAI kept me from trying OpenAI's OAuth connection and I opted to experiment with cheaper models like Kimi k2.5 and Minimax2.7. The results had been mixed with some minor successes in process-building but I was becoming increasingly frustrated with bad results from both Kimi and Minimax at any /think setting. My main issue seemed to be that we'd break something in my config every single session with either of those models.
Yesterday was a brutal day with Kimi, trying and failing to hone in the system so today I finally gave up and opened an OpenAI Plus free trial and set up 5.4 as my main brain model with adaptive think - my openclaw became a wholly new & better machine instantly and, well, it was a cool experience.

We accomplished a ton in ~4-5 hours so I requested it write up a shortlist of what we accomplished today and estimate the token usage:

Key completed wins
• cron system is now much more stable
• scheduled job monitoring is honest
• calendar sync was fixed
• media automation now works from Airtable and sends success emails
• Shopify product creation logic now correctly respects stock status
• Make API access is now available for future reviews and audits

In-progress but meaningfully advanced
• Email List CRM cleanup / sync rebuild
• source tables mapped
• field mapping logic drafted
• safer fill-blanks-only rollout prepared

We spent several hours in a large-context, tool-heavy OpenAI session — roughly hundreds of thousands of tokens worth of context/work, though I don’t have an exact provider-side total.

This list is honestly a little over-compressed so I added back a few things. PATH fixes applied to all cron scripts, for example, was something that Kimi and Minimax were incapable of correcting for me but was a breeze today.

My cron jobs work again, my heartbeat seems to be working, telegram chat has stayed relatively consistent and the gateway has not frozen or quit out. It also seems like the token load overall was massively reduced from the other models I've used though I'll need to dig deeper, and the self reflection it gave me is definitely under-reporting. It seems crazy but just these things are huge upgrades from my daily scenario.

I now have Kimi k2.5 (ollama cloud - free from nvidia) working as my heartbeat model - that's a big upgrade from haiku or gemini flash even if it wasn't working as a main brain. It seems to be staying well inside of the session and weekly usage limits too!

I had been really bummed spending so much time fixing what other models were breaking. While I was happy getting to know the in's and out's of Openclaw it felt like a treadmill and I was just about ready to quit. Today I think I climbed out of the hole with the OAuth connection... and now I just hope I don't blow up the usage limits - $20/month for my use case would be a huge win after spending ~$100 in Feb and March between Anthropic, Moonshot, and Minimax.

I hope my positive experience keeps rolling as I must admit I was pretty much over the OpenClaw project\ and ready to dive deeper into Claude Code. Now I'm excited to find where the new limits are and get frustrated for a whole new set of reasons!

PS. My Openclaw is running on a VM in a base model M2 Mac Mini we use to control an event projector at work. It's setup with tailscale and I use chrome desktop remote to access it when it inevitably dies on telegram. Apparently QMD is now working but I have wrestled with Openclaw to confirm it's working for a month - we'll see after today but overall my agent has been very forgetful. Otherwise my setup is pretty vanilla. Happy to answer any questions if I can!

Thanks!