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Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

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Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#71

Post by Aurornis »

lxgr wrote: post #51
PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 But I'm realizing I'm outdated now.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.

> once your memory size grows above a few hundred lines of text (which you can just dump into the context for most current models)

A few hundred lines of text is nothing for current LLMs.

You can dump the entire contents of The Great Gatsby into any of the frontier LLMs and it’s only around 70K tokens. This is less than 1/3 of common context window sizes. That’s even true for models I run locally on modest hardware now.

The days of chunking everything into paragraphs or pages and building complex workflows to store embeddings, search, and rerank in a big complex pipeline are going away for many common use cases. Having LLMs use simpler tools like grep based on an array of similar search terms and then evaluating what comes up is faster in many cases and doesn’t require elaborate pipelines built around specific context lengths.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#72

Post by Aurornis »

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…

The comment above was saying OpenClaw was useless relative to their other heavy AI usage.

The person you’re criticizing says they’re a heavy AI user. The take was about OpenClaw, not AI.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#73

Post by y1n0 »

simonw wrote: post #70
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.

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 searc…

Context rot is still a problem though, so maybe vector search will stick around in some form. Perhaps we will end up with a tool called `vector grep` or `vg` that handles the vectorized search independent of the agent.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#74

Post by rdedev »

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.

I think it still has a place of your agent is part of a bigger application that you are running and you want to quickly get something in your models context for a quick turnaround

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#75

Post by visarga »

simonw wrote: post #70
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.

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 searc…

The fundamental problem wit RAG is that it extracts only surface level features, "31+24" won't embed close to "55", while "not happy" will be close to "happy". Another issue is that embedding similarity does not indicate logical dependency, you won't retrieve the callers of a function with RAG, you need a LLM or code for that. Third issue is chunking, to embed you need to chunk, but if you chunk you exclude information that might be essential.

The best way to search I think is a coding agent with grep and file system access, and that is because the agent can adapt and explore instead of one shotting it.

I am making my own search tool based on the principle of LoD (level of detail) - any large text input can be trimmed down to about 10KB size by doing clever trimming, for example you could trim the middle of a paragraph keeping the start and end, or you could trim the middle of a large file. Then an agent can zoom in and out of a large file. It skims structure first, then drills into the relevant sections. Using it for analyzing logs, repos, zip files, long PDFs, and coding agent sessions which can run into MB size. Depending on content type we can do different types of compression for code and tree structured data. There is also a "tall narrow cut" (like cut -c -50 on a file).

The promise is - any size input fit into 10KB "glances" and the model can find things more efficiently this way without loading the whole thing.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#76

Post by kmaitreys »

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…

> Open source" is no longer about "Hey I built this tool and everyone should use it".

Was open source ever about that? I thought it was "Hey I built this tool and I'm putting it on internet if anyone wants to use it" often accompanied by a license saying "no warranties".

> 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

I think today's AI tools like Agents are for people who are programmers but don't want to program, not ones who aren't programmers and don't want to program. As in, "no one is going to..." is a very broad statement to make for an average person who just uses apps on thier phone. Your average person will not start vibe coding their own apps just because they can (because they couldn't care less).

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#77

Post by kmaitreys »

johaugum wrote: post #10
pelagicAustral wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, in not vibecoding it yourself you are already saving tokens... Personally, I see no benefit in having an instance of something like this... so, I wouldn't spend tokens, and I wouldn't spend server-time, or any other resource into it, but a lot of people seem to have found a really nice alternative to actually having to use their brains during the day.

> a lot of people seem to have found a really nice alternative to actually having to use their brains during the day. Or have they have found a way to use their brains on what they deem as more useful, and less on what is rote?

I see this retort pasted everywhere. What exactly are you referring to? I think it's fair to assume any competent person never spends their brain in what may be considered as rote in the first place. If one was doing that, well it's unfortunate.

I just keep coming to the conclusion about devs who use agents or other AI tooling extensively: these are programmers who did not like to program.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#79

Post by fassssst »

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…

That’s ChatGPT Pulse
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