Running autonomous AI agents on Apple Silicon for $1.50/month (14 errors later)

Author here. I use Claude Code as my primary dev environment. Wanted autonomous agents I could message from Slack without sending everything through cloud APIs.

The 14 errors are the real content. OpenClaw's docs assume you're using hosted models. Running a 24B local model on a Mac Studio exposed silent failures at every layer: model registry, auth resolution, context management, sub-agent spawning. Error #14 required patching OpenClaw's compiled JS bundle directly.

Key optimization that made it usable: KV cache quantization (Q8_0) nearly doubled usable context and got generation speed from 12 to 49 t/s. Dual-slot GPU allocation prevents sub-agents from starving the main agent.

Happy to answer questions about the setup.