I built a personal AI assistant on a Mac Mini. Within 48 hours, cheap models had poisoned its memory with fabricated colleagues, fictional file shares, and an imaginary costume party. Here is what I learned.
The setup: OpenClaw as the agent framework, ClawRouter for model routing (Gemini Flash for simple tasks, Claude Sonnet for complex ones),
OpenViking for persistent memory.
All running locally on a $600 Mac Mini. Monthly API cost after optimization: $15-35.
First week: 335 requests over 4 days cost $8.09.
Same requests through Claude Opus would have been $152.83.
95% savings from routing simple tasks to cheap models. Sounds perfect, right?