Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 133 posts

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#41

Post by sReinwald »

loveparade wrote: post #27
sReinwald wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But can't you do the same using appropriate MCP servers with any of the LLM providers? Even just a generic browser MCP is probably enough to do most of these things. And ChatGPT has Tasks that are also proactive/scheduled. Not sure if Claude has something similar. If all you want to do is schedule a task there are much easier solutions, like a few lines of python, instead of installing something so heavy in a vm that…

> But can't you do the same just using appropriate MCP servers with any of the LLM providers?

Yeah, absolutely. And that was going to be my approach for a personal AI assistant side project. No need to reinvent the wheel writing a Todoist integration when MCPs exist.

The difference is where it runs. ChatGPT Tasks and MCP through the Claude/OpenAI web interfaces run on their infrastructure, which means no access to your local network — your Home Assistant instance, your NAS, your printer. A self-hosted agent on a mac mini or your old laptop can talk to all of that.

But I think the big value-add here might be "disposable automation". You could set up a Home Assistant automation to check the weather and notify you when rain is coming because you're drying clothes on the clothesline outside. That's 5 minutes of config for something you might need once. Telling your AI assistant "hey, I've got laundry on the line. Let me know if rain's coming and remind me to grab the clothes before it gets dark" takes 10 seconds and you never think about it again. The agent has access to weather forecasts, maybe even your smart home weather station in Home Assistant, and it can create a sub-agent, which polls those once every x minutes and pings your phone when it needs to.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#42

Post by rustyhancock »

sReinwald wrote: post #24
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

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…

I have a few cron jobs that basically are `opencode run` with a context file and it works very well.

At some point OpenClaw will take over in terms of it's benefits but it doesn't feel close yet for the simplicity of just run the job every so often and have OpenCode decide what it needs to do.

Currently it shoots me a notification if my trip to work is likely to be delayed. Could I do it manually well sure.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#43

Post by xylo »

dominicq wrote: post #15
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

Yeah, I don't get it either. Deploy a VM that runs an LLM so that I can talk to it via Telegram... I could just talk to it through an app or a web interface. I'm not even trying to be snarky, like what the hell even is the use case?

Difference is that openclaw is not LLM but engine that spawns up agent that interact with LLM and the system its installed on.

It can have full access to the system it’s running on. So it can browse internet via browser, run cli commands, api’s via skills etc.

Idea is to act like a Jarvis personal assistant. You tell what to do via chat e.g telegram, then it does it for you.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#44

Post by rafram »

sReinwald wrote: post #24
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

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…

But this could be done for 1/100 the cost by only delegating the news-filtering part to an LLM API. No reason not to have an LLM write you the code, too! But putting it in front of task scheduling and API fetching — turning those from simple, consistent tasks to expensive, nondeterministic ones — just makes no sense.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#46

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

baby wrote: post #3
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.

RAG seems odd when you can just have a coding agent manage memory by managing folders. Multi agent also feels weird when you have subagents.

Interesting.

I guess RAG is faster? But I'm realizing I'm outdated now.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#47

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

m00dy wrote: post #21
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.

RAG is broken when you have too much data.

Cant you make thresholds higher?

Hmm... I guess not, you might want all that data.

Super interesting topic. Learning a lot.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#48

Post by kaicianflone »

fhd2 wrote: post #35
thunky wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is tool use with natural language search queries but going down a layer they are searched on a vector DB, very similar to RAG. Essentially Google RankBrain is the very far ancestor to RAG before compute and scaling.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#49

Post by yberreby »

Watching the OpenClaw/Molbot craze has been entertaining. I wouldn't use it - too much code, changing too quickly, with too little regard for security - but it has inspired me.

I often have ideas while cleaning around, cooking, etc. Claude Code (with Opus 4.5) is very capable. I've long wanted to get Claude Code working hands-free.

So I took an afternoon and rolled my own STT-TTS voice stack for Claude Code. The voice stack runs locally on my M4 Pro and is extremely fast.

For Speech to Text, Parakeet v3 TDT: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3

For Text to Speech, Pocket TTS: https://github.com/kyutai-labs/pocket-tts

Custom MCP to hook this into Claude Code, with a little bit of hacking around to get my AirPods' stem click to be captured.

I'm having Claude narrate its thought process and everything it's doing in short, frequent messages, and I can interrupt it at any time with a stem click, which starts listening to me and sends the message once a sufficiently long pause is detected.

I stream the Claude Code session via AirPlay to my living room TV, so that I don't have to get close to the laptop if I need extra details about what it's doing.

Yesterday, I had it debug a custom WhatsApp integration (via [1]) hands-free while brushing my teeth. It can use `osascript` for OS integration, browse the web via Claude Code's builtin tools...

My back is thankful. This is really fun.

[1]: https://github.com/jlucaso1/whatsapp-rust

Post reply on HN