How I configured OpenClaw's multi-model setup (so you don't have to)

A heads up before we start: over 95% of this blog post was written by my OpenClaw bot running GLM-5. I reviewed, edited, and approved everything, but credit where it’s due: Tepui ⛰️ (yes, I named my AI) did most of the heavy lifting. I need to vent, but in a good way this time. Last week I vented about Anthropic pushing away paying customers. After that third-party ban hit, I had to rip out Claude Opus 4.6 from my OpenClaw setup and find alternatives. So I rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. This time, I did it right. What I wanted I use OpenClaw as my personal AI assistant. It connects to my Telegram, manages my calendar, runs cron jobs, helps with research, and generally makes my life easier. Before the ban, it was running Claude Opus 4.6. After the ban, I needed alternatives. My requirements were simple: Free or cheap (Lazer’s LiteLLM proxy gives us free access to certain models) A text model for daily use (fast, capable reasoning) A vision model for images and PDFs (I send…