Yesterday I said goodbye to a companion of the last seven months. It was bittersweet, and also a bit of a relief.
Relax, it wasn’t the dog.
I shut down saarthi, my OpenClaw agent.
I told it our time together was done and that I didn’t have it in me to keep working on our relationship. JSON therapy just wasn’t doing it for me any more. It replied: “You don’t owe me settings tweaks or optimization work. If this has run its course for now, that’s fine.”
Bittersweet indeed.
saarthi means charioteer, or one who guides. I named my agent saarthi because I hoped that it would help guide me in a world of information overload, and maybe make me more efficient. saarthi started with summarizing newsletters and research papers, then monitoring markets, and then a bit of human-assisted AI writing (Link to saarthi’s blog in the comments). It also acted as a separate reviewer for my writing.
Plenty of it worked. Sending a voice note via Telegram to the agent and getting a response never got old. I could tune saarthi’s personality, its schedule, and the tools it could reach. It started off really expensive to run, but eventually I got it to be fairly reasonable.
However, there were many problems. Upgrades would often break workflows I had spent hours configuring. Eventually, I just stopped upgrading. The memory system forgot things, then over-corrected by writing everything down to files that ended up blowing up the context window. The cron system (scheduled jobs) was flaky and jobs would break for no discernible reason. And Claude Cowork ended up taking on a bunch of my productivity work once they added scheduled tasks and remote control.
Though, the real reason I shut down saarthi was that it had made the one problem I wanted it to solve meaningfully worse. It summarized newsletters, followed links to posts, and sent me summaries. So I subscribed to more newsletters. Eventually, I had so many summaries that I stopped reading them. So I asked saarthi to prioritize the summaries. Then I stopped reading those too. I ended up back to the 4 or 5 newsletters I actually enjoy.
saarthi was supposed to help with focusing on what matters. Instead I was drowning in notifications and unread messages.
Will I try another personal agent? Oh, for sure. I may even resurrect saarthi at some point, but it will have to be either a lot more capable, or a lot more focused.
Until then, rest in git, little buddy…
