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Don't trust AI agents

nanoclaw.dev

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Re: Don't trust AI agents

#101

Post by theturtletalks »

tao_oat wrote: post #70
theturtletalks wrote: post #44

Has anyone used: OpenClaw NanoClaw IronClaw PicoClaw ZeroClaw NullClaw Any insights on how they differ and which one is leading the race?

I haven't used them all but based on my partial research so far: - OpenClaw: the big one, but extremely messy codebase and deployment - NanoClaw: simple, main selling point is that agents spawn their own containers. Personally I don't see why that's preferable to just running the whole thing in a container for single-user purposes - IronClaw: focused on security (tools run in a WASM sandbox, some defenses against pro…

Which would you say has the best cron and heartbeat implementation?

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#102

Post by tao_oat »

theturtletalks wrote: post #101
tao_oat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used them all but based on my partial research so far: - OpenClaw: the big one, but extremely messy codebase and deployment - NanoClaw: simple, main selling point is that agents spawn their own containers. Personally I don't see why that's preferable to just running the whole thing in a container for single-user purposes - IronClaw: focused on security (tools run in a WASM sandbox, some defenses against pro…

Which would you say has the best cron and heartbeat implementation?

Haven't tried them in enough depth to compare.

Nanobot's was not great (cron + a HEARTBEAT.md meant two ways to do things, which would confuse the AI). But because the implementation is so simple, I could improve it in a few minutes in my own fork!

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#103

Post by barbazoo »

tao_oat wrote: post #70
theturtletalks wrote: post #44

Has anyone used: OpenClaw NanoClaw IronClaw PicoClaw ZeroClaw NullClaw Any insights on how they differ and which one is leading the race?

I haven't used them all but based on my partial research so far: - OpenClaw: the big one, but extremely messy codebase and deployment - NanoClaw: simple, main selling point is that agents spawn their own containers. Personally I don't see why that's preferable to just running the whole thing in a container for single-user purposes - IronClaw: focused on security (tools run in a WASM sandbox, some defenses against pro…

Everything supports WA, Telegram, etc. I wish it wasn't so hard to hook up Signal to anything.

I'm using the signal-cli-rest-api but the whole setup feels kinda wonky.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#104

Post by mathgladiator »

I was blown away by OpenClaw until I saw the bill. Ultimately, I think of these ecosystems as personal enhancements and AI costs need to come down dramatically for real problem. Worse, however, is the security theater. I would not want to be the operator for any business built with front-line LLM usage based on a yolo'd agent framework. I'm very happy to use these for silo'd components that are well isolated and have reasonable QA processes (and that can even included agents since now we literally have no excuse to not have amazing test coverage).

Their niche is going to be back office support, but even that creates risk boundaries that can be insurmountable. A friend of mine had a agent do sudo rm -rf ... wtf.

My view is that I want to launch an agent based service, but I'm building a statically typed ecosystem to do so with bounds and extreme limits.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#105

Post by cyanydeez »

mathgladiator wrote: post #104

I was blown away by OpenClaw until I saw the bill. Ultimately, I think of these ecosystems as personal enhancements and AI costs need to come down dramatically for real problem. Worse, however, is the security theater. I would not want to be the operator for any business built with front-line LLM usage based on a yolo'd agent framework. I'm very happy to use these for silo'd components that are well isolated and have…

Look at AI like what search turned into: feed the user anything, even if wrong because not doing so will make your product look weak.

Thats what youll find when you try to make these bag-o-words do reasonable things.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#106

Post by nickdirienzo »

I tried NanoClaw and love the skill (and container by default) model. But having skills generate new code in my personalized fork feels off to me… I think it’s because eventually the “few thousand auditable lines” idea vanishes with enough skills added?

Could skill contributions collapse into only markdown and MCP calls? New features would still be just skills; they’d bring in versioned, open-source MCP servers running inside the same container sandbox. I haven’t tried this (yet) but I think this could keep the flexibility while minimizing skill code stepping on each other.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#107

Post by noman-land »

sarchertech wrote: post #22
himata4113 wrote: post #4

My assistant has no permissions at all and is just as useful. All it needs is todo, reminders and websearch (and maybe a browser but ymmv).

If I was malicious I could do a lot of damage to someone with subtle manipulation of todo and reminders. I’ll bet I could even push someone on the margins into divorce.

How would you do it?

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#108

Post by redman25 »

huqedato wrote: post #65
theturtletalks wrote: post #44

Has anyone used: OpenClaw NanoClaw IronClaw PicoClaw ZeroClaw NullClaw Any insights on how they differ and which one is leading the race?

The same crap under the hood, IMO.

Yeah, good software takes time. These are all popping up way to fast.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#109

Post by nz »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #6

Really good points about ai making gigantic heaps of code no human can ever review. It's almost like bureaucracy. The systems we have in governments or large corporations to do anything might seem bloated an could be simplified. But it's there to keep a lot of people employed, pacified, powers distributed in a way to prevent hostile takeovers (crazy). I think there was a cgp grey video about rulers which made the sam…

An interesting economic fact: Karl Marx observed that if factories keep getting more efficient, eventually, they will require fewer workers because the population is not growing quickly enough to match the increasing rate of production. This, as we have seen historically, is correct: we have fewer workers per factory and fewer factories per manufactured widget. Marx also observed that this will create mass unemployment. While this is _logically_ correct, it did not really turn out that way _historically_. Most of the manufacturing labor was replaced with bureaucratic labor (so called white-collar labor) -- all of those manufacturing firms needed to grow their internal bureaucracies to manage and direct a sprawling supply-chain.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#110

Post by saltcured »

medi8r wrote: post #48
gyomu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it’s pretty wild. Even pg is tweeting stuff like “An experienced programmer told me he's now using AI to generate a thousand lines of code an hour.“ https://x.com/paulg/status/2026739899936944495 Like if you had told pg to his face in (pre AI) office hours “I’m producing a thousand lines of code an hour”, I’m pretty sure he’d have laughed and pointed out how pointless that metric was?

He is a Lisper too, making it more ironic. Lisp the power to heavily reduce cruft by heavy customization with macros.

Thousand left-parens per hour...?
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