I am not sure if “locked in” is the word I would use to describe my current usage of claude, but I must admit it is the default I reach for on a day to day basis when working.
One of the main reasons is not quality, but speed, and ease of use.
I got pi working to a state that is comparable, using an Eden AI account, and the tokens it uses are not expensive at all. My only gripe is that it is slow. I tried using OpenRouter instead of Eden AI, but that did not improve the speed noticeably.
The way I feel now is that if I could keep Opus 5 level quality, at blazing speed, and run that locally, that would be all I ever need from LLMs.
Meanwhile my Mac Mini is an OpenClaw to which the interface is through matrix and the model is through Eden AI. It is used to:
- Manage my Obsidian vault on a dedicated git branch. For example I would scan a photo of a travel tip in a magazine in a café, and tell it to note all the restaurant addresses in my travel notes for Paris. Or I would scan a hand written draft of a text and tell it to put it as a draft in my blog posts folder.
- It also has access to an LED badge I bought at FOSDEM, and it can use it to display messages. It can read the schedule of the nearest public transport and show me countdown timers for the next bus.
- It can play Qobuz on my local music system. I have a playlist of albums I keep in Obsidian and it can read that, display it on a connected playdate, and have the playdate choose an album from that list to play.
- It manages a home assistant server. I made sure it can measure the electricity it uses as well, so it could optimize for efficiency. I will probably make it manage the heating in the living room soon.
- I set it up to have an alternative for ChatGPT through the use of matrix threads, but it is sometimes a bit too slow to reply. The advantage though is that all conversations of my OpenClaw are set up to go into my Obsidian vault as well.
It is completely patched together by conversing with OpenClaw, mainly in between other activities.
To fix the speed I should either buy a new Mac Mini, use a quicker provider, or profile to see if I can fix any bottlenecks.
An hour ago I installed a very limited local model on it and I can now theoretically start using that local model.
It has also been configured as a borg backup destination for my laptop, with a monitor warning when the backup is stale.
So not locked in, just comfortably defaulted with a lot of fun options to tinker with.