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Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

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Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#111

Post by andai »

gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #83
yberreby wrote: post #49

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 voic…

On one hand, I think this project is super cool and something I would use and/or would have loved to build myself for my own use. On the other hand, it makes me wonder if we’re just heading for a future where everyone is just always working, at all times, even while doing other things. “Wow look at our daughter taking her first steps! She’s doing so… wait hold on… No, Claude. I said to name the class “potatoes”, not…

Working? That's the AI's job!

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#112

Post by andai »

visarga wrote: post #75
simonw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informati…

>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 tried the knowledge base feature in Claude web recently, uploaded a long textbook.

The indexer crashed and the book never fully indexed, but Claude had access to some kind of VM and reverse engineered the (automatically converted) book's fileformat and used shell tools to search it for the answers to my questions.

(Again, this was the web version of Claude, not Claude Code on my computer!)

I thought that was really neat, a little silly, and a little scary.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#113

Post by tomlis »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #65
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As a rule of thumb, most people who say things like "X is useless and a waste" or "Y is revolutionary and is going to change everything by tomorrow" when the dust hasn't even begun to settle are stupid, overly-excitable, too biased towards negative outlooks, and/or trying to sell you something.

Sometimes they have some good points so you should listen to what they have to say. But that doesn't mean you have to get absorbed into their world view. Just integrate what you see as useful from your current POV and move on.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#114

Post by andai »

visarga wrote: post #98
visarga wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informati…

Ok 2 hours later here is the release: https://github.com/horiacristescu/nub

>Code retains its function signatures

Nice. In original GPT-4 days (April 2023), I made a simple coding agent that worked with GPT-4's 8K (!) context window. The original version used some kind of AST walker, but then I realized I can get basically identical result (for Python) with `grep def` and `grep class`...

Took a look at your repo though, I am impressed you put a lot of thought into this.

It's interesting that Anthropic doesn't seem to be incentivized to do anything like this. Their approach seems to be "spawn a bunch of Haikus to grep around whole codebase until one of them finds something". You'd think a few lines of code could give you an overview of the codebase before you go blindly poking around. But maybe they're optimized for massive codebases where even the skeletons end up eating huge amounts of context.

The subagents "solve" context pollution by dying. If they find something, they only tell you the parent agent where it is. If not, they tell nothing. I guess that works but it feels heavy-handed somehow.

In CC I added a startup hook that similar to yours, dumps the skeleton of current dir, files, function names etc. into context, and the "time spent poking around" drops to zero.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#115

Post by andai »

rando77 wrote: post #17
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.

I've been leaning towards multi agent because sub agent relies on the main agent having all the power and using it responsibly.

What does that mean?

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#116

Post by threethirtytwo »

somebehemoth wrote: post #95
threethirtytwo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wh…

> There's more people saying AI doesn't live up to the hype. It is possible they are correct and nothing you have written suggests otherwise. > The people who are saying it's utterly useless is still quite large on HN. Are these people's opinions less valid than your own? Are you angry your opinion might be a minority on this one website? > It's just that most of them are midway through changing their story because r…

Come back to this comment in 2 years lol. By then you’ll see it wasn’t opinion.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#117

Post by kaashif »

tomlis wrote: post #109
orsorna wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the opposite, where if you are not exploiting your newly freed time with more work, you will be left behind. This is the premise of the comic Power Nap . https://www.powernapcomic.com/powernap/

Well, at some point it's up to us to say 'no.' Weekends have not always been a widely accepted ritual[1]. They only became one because of collective action. Dedicating any and all of your free time to work only becomes a norm if we let it. [1]: https://www.goodwinrecruiting.com/eight-hour-workdays-and-40...

Well, they did specify your _newly_ freed time. So if you work 8 hours now and AI lets you do that work in 4, then you'll just do double the work in 8 hours, not get more free time.

I don't think there's an obvious point to take collective action.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#118

Post by kaashif »

orsorna wrote: post #104
volkk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we kind of already are with our phones and Slack, the difference at this point is negligible. i personally won't have airpods in 24/7 with my kid (or ever) so if i were doing something like this, it would be through my phone, which is already something i use fairly often. not too much difference there IMO (at least anecdotally speaking)

I don't know what kind of work you do on a daily basis. But, the difference between sending a Slack message and sending a message to kick off an agent to chain a bunch of tasks together is a vastly lower activation barrier. I think many people will jump over that lower barrier out of FOMO, to avoid being outcompeted by those who already jumped. As an IC though, me sending a slack message is perhaps less impactful tha…

Maybe I'm just an idiot but...which one is the lower activation energy one?

If I need something done and I ask one of my team members to do it, I trust them to get it done without supervision. They are good at their jobs and I leave them to it.

But I usually have to babysit an agent somewhat.

Re: Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

#119

Post by mrbeep »

yberreby wrote: post #49

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 voic…

Nice setup! If you ever want to add Telegram alongside WhatsApp, check out tgcli - it's a pure Rust Telegram CLI (no TDLib, no C/C++ deps).

https://github.com/dgrr/tgcli

It does sync, messages, send, search (FTS5), stickers, forum topics, and has socket IPC for automation. Install via cargo or homebrew. Seems like it'd fit nicely into what you're building.

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