I burned $250 in tokens on day one with OpenClaw. Here's why.

The author spent $250 in API tokens on day one of using OpenClaw due to context creep, tool output bloat, scheduled job overhead, and duplicate triggers—all without any production traffic. The fix involved smaller context windows, trimming tool outputs, fresh session boundaries, and switching away from the most expensive model by default. This experience led to creating RoBC, an open-source project on GitHub, now deployed on clawpane.co.