Tommy Geoco spent ninety days and $13,100 tinkering with OpenClaw. His agent runs his capture loop, prepares his meetings, codes the survey for the state-of-prototyping report his studio shipped, and distributes his content across ten platforms. Tom describes the harness like this:
When you install OpenClaw, it is like a starter kit project car. It is a car frame with a swappable engine. The engine being any AI model you choose to use. It is basically a folder that you install onto your computer that contains about seven markdown files. […] When you stop thinking of a custom agent as just a chatbot and start thinking of it like an operating system, some useful questions are going to start to pop up like where does the memory live? What is the source of truth? How do I enforce my rules better? What should stay manual?
The seven files are plain text. soul.md holds the agent’s voice and judgment, agents.md defines permissions, memory.md handles long-term recall, and four others cover identity, the user, tool instructions, and a heartbeat. Tom layers an Obsidian vault on top as long-term knowledge and Slack as the chat surface. Tom on what actually limits an agent:
The agent’s limitations aren’t just about the model. They’re a lot more about the system that you have built around it because you can’t control the quality of the model, but you can control the quality of the system. […] The most important part of my setup is the knowledge vault. This is my alternate memory, and it is built around the work that I actually do.
Geoco says curation is what keeps the whole thing from drifting. The agent runs the loops on top of a vault Geoco curates, and the taste lives with him; the model itself is interchangeable. The challenging part is somewhere else entirely:
The most challenging part of this whole thing is the unlearning. Many of us have old habits that have calcified into our brain. It is why my 17-year-old is able to run laps around us. He has no baggage about how things are supposed to work.
Geoco is right that the unlearning is where the difficulty lives. The harness is just markdown and the model is rented; the orchestration skill Benhur Senabathi described as what designers actually picked up in 2025 is what you practice through the unlearning. Geoco closes the video by saying nobody’s harness is right and everybody’s works for them, which sounds about right to me too.
