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Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

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Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#31

Post by px43 »

vanillameow wrote: post #5

Yeah I mean idk, my takeaway from OpenClaw was pretty much the same - why use someone's insane vibecoded 400k LoC CLI wrapper with 50k lines of "docs" (AI slop; and another 50k Chinese translation of the same AI slop) when I can just Claude Code myself a custom wrapper in 30 mins that has exactly what I need and won't take 4 seconds to respond to a CLI call. But my reaction to this project is again: Why would I use t…

"Open source" is no longer about "Hey I built this tool and everyone should use it". It's about "Hey I did this thing and it works for me, here's the lessons I learned along the way", at which point anyone can pull in what they need, discard what they don't, and build out their own bespoke tool sets for whatever job they're trying to accomplish.

No one is trying to get you to use openclaw or nanobot, but now that they exist in the world, our agents can use the knowledge to build better tooling for us as individuals. If the projects get a lot of stars, they become part of the global training set that every coding agent is trained against, and the utility of the tooling continues to increase.

I've been running two openclaw agents, and they both made their own branchs, and modified their memory tooling to accommodate their respective tasks etc. They regularly check for upstream things that might be interesting to pull in, especially security related stuff.

It feels like pretty soon, no one is going to just have a bunch of apps on their phone written by other people. They're going to have a small set of apps custom built for exactly the things they're trying to do day to day.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#33

Post by naasking »

johaugum wrote: post #2

Skimmed the repo, this is basically the irreducible core of an agent: small loop, provider abstraction, tool dispatch, and chat gateways . The LOC reduction (99%, from 400k to 4k) mostly comes from leaving out RAG pipelines, planners, multi-agent orchestration, UIs, and production ops.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what they are, planners seem kind of important.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#34

Post by threethirtytwo »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #22
loveparade wrote: post #11

What are people using these things for? The use cases I've seen look a bit contrived and I could ask Claude or ChatGPT to do it directly

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…

there's an entire cohort on HN who still claim AI is utterly and completely useless despite in your face evidence. Literally people making a similar claim word for word who say that they don't understand the hype that they used AI themselves and it's shit.

Meanwhile my entire company uses AI and the on the ground reality for me versus the cohort above is so much at odds with each other we're both claiming the other side is insane.

I haven't used these bots yet but I want to see the full story. Not just one guys take and one guys personal experience. The hype exists because there are success stories. I want to hear those as well.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#35

Post by fhd2 »

thunky wrote: post #28
m00dy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAG is broken when you have too much data.

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

It's not tool use with natural language search queries? That's what I'd expect.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#38

Post by jamespo »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #34
ryanjshaw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

there's an entire cohort on HN who still claim AI is utterly and completely useless despite in your face evidence. Literally people making a similar claim word for word who say that they don't understand the hype that they used AI themselves and it's shit. Meanwhile my entire company uses AI and the on the ground reality for me versus the cohort above is so much at odds with each other we're both claiming the other s…

There's people saying AI isn't living up its hype / valuation, I don't see many saying "utterly useless".

And there's plenty who worship at the altar of Claude.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#39

Post by threethirtytwo »

vanillameow wrote: post #5

Yeah I mean idk, my takeaway from OpenClaw was pretty much the same - why use someone's insane vibecoded 400k LoC CLI wrapper with 50k lines of "docs" (AI slop; and another 50k Chinese translation of the same AI slop) when I can just Claude Code myself a custom wrapper in 30 mins that has exactly what I need and won't take 4 seconds to respond to a CLI call. But my reaction to this project is again: Why would I use t…

What I read is the unlimited token count. You get the most out of this when having it run on an autonomous loop where your interaction is much more minimal? But pinging the thing every minute in a loop is going to terminate your token limit so running the LLM locally is the way to get infinite tokens.

The problem is local models aren't as good as the ones in the cloud. I think the success stories are people who spent like 2-4k on a beefy system to run OpenClaw or these chatbots locally.

The commands they run are, I assume like detailed versions of prompts that are essentially: "build my website." "Invest in stocks." And then watch it run for days.

When using claude code it's essentially a partnership. You need to constantly manage it and curate it for safety but also so the token count doesn't go overboard. With a fully autonomous agent and unlimited token count you can assign it to tasks where this doesn't matter as much. Did the agent screw up and write bad code? The point is you can have the system prompt engage in self correction.

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