Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

Here’s a copy of a post I made on Farcaster where I’m unconvinced it’s actually being used at all:

I've used OpenClaw for 2 full days and 3 evenings now. I simply don't believe people are using this for anything majorly productive.

I really, really want to like it. I see glimpses of the future in it. I generally try to be a positive guy. But after spending $200 on Claude Max, running with Opus 4.5 most of the time, I'm just so irritated and agitated... IT'S JUST SO BAD IN SO MANY WAYS.

1. It goes off on these huge 10min tangents that are the equivalent of climbing out of your window and flying around the world just to get out of your bed. The /abort command works maybe 1 time out of 100, so I end up having to REBOOT THE SERVER so as not to waste tokens!

2. No matter how many times I tell it not to do things with side effects without checking in with me first, it insists on doing bizarre things like trying to sign up for new accounts people when it hits an inconvenient snag with the account we're using, or it tried emailing and chatting to support agents because it can't figure out something it could easily have asked ME for help with, etc.

3. Which reminds me that its memory is awful. I have to remind it to remind itself. It doesn't understand what it's doing half the time (e.g. it forgets the password it generated for something). It forgets things regularly; this could be because I keep having to reboot the server.

4. It forgets critical things after compaction because the algorithm is awful. There I am, typing away, and suddenly it's like the Men in Black paid a visit and the last 30min didn't happen. Surely just throwing away the oldest 75% of tokens would be more effective than whatever it's doing? Because it completely loses track of what we're doing and what I asked it NOT to do, I end up with problem (1) again.

5. When it does remember things, it spreads those memories all over the place in different locations and forgets to keep them consistent. So after a reboot it gets confused about what is the truth.

Disclaimer: Haven't used any of these (was going to try OpenClaw but found too many issues). I think the biggest value-add is agency. Chat interfaces like Claude/ChatGPT are reactive, but agents can be proactive. They don't need to wait for you to initiate a conversation.

What I've always wanted: a morning briefing that pulls in my calendar (CalDAV), open Todoist items, weather, and relevant news. The first three are trivial API work. The news part is where it gets interesting and more difficult - RSS feeds and news APIs are firehoses. But an LLM that knows your interests could actually filter effectively. E.g., I want tech news but don't care about Android (iPhone user) or MacOS (Linux user). That kind of nuanced filtering is hard to express as traditional rules but trivial for an LLM.

You could, but Claude Code's memory system works well for specialized tasks like coding - not so much for a general-purpose assistant. It stores everything in flat markdown files, which means you're pulling in the full file regardless of relevance. That costs tokens and dilutes the context the model actually needs.

An embedding-based memory system (letta, mem0, or a self-built PostgreSQL + pgvector setup) lets you retrieve selectively and only grab what's relevant to the current query. Much better fit for anything beyond a narrow use case. Your assistant doesn't need to know your location and address when you're asking it to look up whether sharks are indeed older than trees, but it probably should know where you live when you ask it about the weather, or good Thai restaurants near you.

Gemini with Google search is RAG using all public data, and it isn't broken.

The core "design" not bad, but the "code" quality is .. mid.

They are basically keep breaking different feature on every release.