Think of the model as an engineer with a small desk. If hundreds of tool manuals cover it, every request becomes expensive and the right manual is harder to find. Codex instead provides a short catalog and retrieves only the most relevant manuals. This article explains that design, BM25 ranking, reuse in Python or Go, and model replacement. This article is pinned to stable rust-v0.147.0, released on August 7, 2026, at commit be6e8eac. I also rechecked main at commit 646f7c0a on August 9. Two conclusions matter up front:
OpenClaw’s vector retrieval silently failed — but BM25 text search kept the memory system running for two weeks unnoticed. Should you even bother fixing it? Here’s how I used NVIDIA’s free embedding API to complete the picture at zero cost.