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Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

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Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#61

Post by ryanjshaw »

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…

I don’t know how you came to that conclusion from my comment. I’m talking about a particular product named OpenClaw, representing a new style of doing work; not AI in general.

I dropped $200 on Claude Max in my personal capacity to test OpenClaw because I use Opus 4.5 all day in Cursor on an enterprise subscription… because it works for those problems.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#62

Post by johaugum »

naasking wrote: post #33
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.

As you mentioned, that depends on what you mean by planners.

An LLM will implicitly decompose a prompt into tasks and then sequentially execute them, calling the appropriate tools. The architecture diagram helpfully visualizes this [0]

Here though, planners means autonomous planners that exist as higher level infrastructure, that does external task decomposition, persistent state, tool scheduling, error recovery/replanning, and branching/search. Think a task like “Prompt: “Scan repo for auth bugs, run tests, open PR with fixes, notify Slack.” that just runs continuously 24/7, that would be beyond what nanobot could do. However, something like “find all the receipts in my emails for this year, then zip and email them to my accountant for my tax return” is something nanobot would do.

[0] https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot/blob/main/nanobot_arch.png

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#63

Post by threethirtytwo »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #61
threethirtytwo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t know how you came to that conclusion from my comment. I’m talking about a particular product named OpenClaw, representing a new style of doing work; not AI in general. I dropped $200 on Claude Max in my personal capacity to test OpenClaw because I use Opus 4.5 all day in Cursor on an enterprise subscription… because it works for those problems.

>I don’t know how you came to that conclusion from my comment. I’m talking about a particular product named OpenClaw, representing a new style of doing work; not AI in general.

Right, I'm saying AI in general is an example of the unreliability of peoples experiences on openclaw. If people are so unreliable about the narrative of AI, I don't trust the narrative of openclaw which on this thread in particular is very negative and in stark contrast to the hype.

>I dropped $200 on Claude Max in my personal capacity to test OpenClaw because I use Opus 4.5 all day in Cursor on an enterprise subscription… because it works for those problems.

The comment wasn't directed at you personally. I'm just saying I want to see counter examples of openclaw succeeding, not just examples of it failing. Frankly on this thread there's Zero success stories which I find sort of strange.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#64

Post by threethirtytwo »

jamespo wrote: post #38
threethirtytwo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

There's more people saying AI doesn't live up to the hype. The people who are saying it's utterly useless is still quite large on HN. It's just that most of them are midway through changing their story because reality is smashing them in the face.

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

I mean who doesn't use it? No one claims it's perfect or a god of code. But if you're not using it you're behind.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#65

Post by threethirtytwo »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #52
threethirtytwo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. But on HN, there's a huge cohort of people saying AI is useless.

Everyone sees the downsides but the upside is the one everyone is in denial about. It's like yeah, there's downsides but why is literally everyone using it?

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#66

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

plingamp wrote: post #53
m00dy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

So you're telling me rampancy ( https://www.halopedia.org/Rampancy ) is real.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#67

Post by thunky »

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's RAG via tool use, where the storage and retreival method is an implementation detail.

I'm not a huge fan of the term RAG though because if you squint almost all tool use could be considered RAG.

But if you stick with RAG being a form of "knowledge search" then I think Google search easily fits.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#68

Post by renewiltord »

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…

You’re correct. Any statement by HN users that something is useless has no value because they say that about useful things too.

Moltbot has the shape of the future but doesn’t feel like it to me. Sort of like Langchain once was. Demonstrated some new paradigm shift but is itself flawed so may not be the implementation that lasts. Time will tell.

The only thing here to say is “put it in a VM and try it”. It’s easy to try.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#69

Post by naasking »

johaugum wrote: post #62
naasking wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As you mentioned, that depends on what you mean by planners. An LLM will implicitly decompose a prompt into tasks and then sequentially execute them, calling the appropriate tools. The architecture diagram helpfully visualizes this [0] Here though, planners means autonomous planners that exist as higher level infrastructure, that does external task decomposition, persistent state, tool scheduling, error recovery/repl…

Sure, instruction tuned models implicitly plan, but they can easily lose the plot on long contexts. If you're going to have an agent running continuously and accumulating memory (parsing results from tool use, web fetches, previous history, etc.), then plan decomposition, persistence and error recovery seems like a good idea, so you can start subagents with fresh contexts for task items and they stay on task or can recover without starting everything over again. Also seems better for cost since input and output contexts are more bounded.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#70

Post by simonw »

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.

Yeah, vector embeddings based RAG has fallen out of fashion somewhat.

It was great when LLMs had 4,000 or 8,000 token context windows and the biggest challenge was efficiently figuring out the most likely chunks of text to feed into that window to answer a question.

These days LLMS all have 100,000+ context windows, which means you don't have to be nearly as selective. They're also exceptionally good at running search tools - give them grep or rg or even `select * from t where body like ...` and they'll almost certainly be able to find the information they need after a few loops.

Vector embeddings give you fuzzy search, so "dog" also matches "puppy" - but a good LLM with a search tool will search for "dog" and then try a second search for "puppy" if the first one doesn't return the results it needs.

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