OpenClaw AI agents degrade in performance and cost over time due to three compounding issues: context bloat from growing memory graphs, static tokens being reprocessed on every API call without caching, and all requests being routed to the same expensive frontier model regardless of complexity. The structural fix is intelligent request routing via Manifest, an open-source OpenClaw plugin. Manifest intercepts each request, scores it across 23 dimensions in under 2ms, and routes it to one of four model tiers (simple, standard, complex, reasoning). This approach can reduce costs by up to 70% by sending only genuinely complex tasks to frontier models. Manifest also provides spend limit controls, fallback chains per tier, a dashboard with per-call cost breakdowns, and OAuth-based provider authentication.