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Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

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Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#51

Post by lxgr »

PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #46
baby wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 But I'm realizing I'm outdated now.

No, RAG is definitely preferable once your memory size grows above a few hundred lines of text (which you can just dump into the context for most current models), since you're no longer fighting context limits and needle-in-a-haystack LLM retrieval performance problems.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#52

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

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…

What do you use AI for?

Pretty much everyone in my company also uses AI. But everyone sees the same downsides.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#53

Post by plingamp »

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.

Specifically when the document number reaches around 10k+, a phenomenon called "Semantic Collapse" occurs.

https://dho.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Legal_RAG_Halluc...

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#54

Post by lxgr »

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

One significant advantage over Claude/ChatGPT is that your own agent will be able to access many websites that block cloud-hosted agents via robots.txt and/or IP filters. This is unfortunately getting more common.

Another is that you have access to and control over its memory much more directly, since it's entirely based on text files on your machine. Much less vendor lock-in.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#55

Post by vanillameow »

px43 wrote: post #31
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 the…

"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."

OpenClaw currently has 1.8k issues, 400k lines of code, had an RCE exploit discovered just a few days ago, it takes 5 seconds to get a response when I type "openclaw" in my CLI and most of the top skills are malware. I'm pretty sure training on that repository is the equivalent to eating a cyanide pill for a coding model.

I actually agree with your take that custom apps will take over a subset of established software for some users at some point, but I don't think models poisoning themselves with recklessly vibecoded bloatware is how we get there at all.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#57

Post by sReinwald »

rafram wrote: post #44
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 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.

Like I said, the first examples are fairly trivial, and you absolutely don't need an LLM for those. A good agent architecture lets the LLM orchestrate but the actual API calls are deterministic (through tool use / MCPs).

My point was specifically about the news filtering part, which was something I had tried in the past but never managed to solve to my satisfaction.

The agent's job in the end for a morning briefing would be:

  - grab weather, calendar, Todoist data using APIs or MCP  
  - grab news from select sources via RSS or similar, then filter relevant news based on my interests and things it has learned about me  
  - synthesize the information above
The steps that explicitly require an LLM are the last two. The value is in the personalization through memory and my feedback but also the ability for the LLM to synthesize the information - not just regurgitate it. Here's what I mean: I have a task to mow the lawn on my Todoist scheduled for today, but the weather forecast says it's going to be a bit windy and rain all day. At the end of the briefing, the assistant can proactively offer to move the Todoist task to tomorrow when it will be nicer outside because it knows the forecast. Or it might offer to move it to the day after tomorrow, because it also knows I have to attend my nephew's birthday party tomorrow.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#59

Post by loveparade »

sReinwald wrote: post #41
loveparade wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

But if you run e.g. Claude/Codex/opencode/etc locally you also have access to your local machine and network? What is the difference?

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#60

Post by bosky101 »

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…

i've never had situations where i prompt and had to go out for coffee or a walk or drive. one shotting - your first prompt. perhaps.

but like a person - when the possibility of going off in the wron g direction is so high, i've always had 1 - 2 line prompts, small iterations much more appealing. The only times i've had to rollback would be when i run out of credits, and a new model cant deal with the half baked context, errors, refactoring.

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