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Don't trust AI agents

nanoclaw.dev

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Re: Don't trust AI agents

#141

Post by danjc »

badsectoracula wrote: post #32

> OpenClaw has nearly half a million lines of code, 53 config files, and over 70 dependencies. This breaks the basic premise of open source security. Chromium has 35+ million lines, but you trust Google’s review processes. Most open source projects work the other way: they stay small enough that many eyes can actually review them. Nobody has reviewed OpenClaw’s 400,000 lines. This reminds me of a very common thing po…

I've been waiting for someone to say this. An agent will generally produce far more code than technically necessary for the task. It's a kind of over engineering which makes it increasingly harder to wrap your head around the codebase.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#142

Post by atonse »

nickdirienzo wrote: post #106

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 runni…

> I think it’s because eventually the “few thousand auditable lines” idea vanishes with enough skills added?

I just watched a youtube interview with the creator. He actually explains it well. OpenClaw has hundreds of thousands of lines you will never use.

For example, if I only use iMessage, I have lots of code (all the other messaging integrations) that will never be used.

So the skills model means that you only "generate code" that _you_ specifically ask for.

In fact, as I'm explaining this, it feels like "lazy-loading" of code, which is a pretty cool idea. Whereas OpenClaw "eager-loads" all possible code whether you use it or not.

And that's appealing enough to me to set it up. I just haven't put it in any time to customize it, etc.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#143

Post by ninkendo »

bee_rider wrote: post #112
ninkendo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, it feels like your position requires a very low, if not brain-dead level of incompetence on the part of LLM users, in order for your conclusion to be correct. My personal anecdote: I used an LLM recently to basically vibe code a password manager. Now, I’ve been a software engineer for 20 years. I’m very familiar with the process of code review and how to dive in to someone else’s code and get a feel for…

If you measure the productivity of the system that is “you, using an LLM” in terms of the rate at which you can get actually-reviewed code completed (which, based on your comment, seems to be what you were doing) that seems like a totally reasonable way of doing things. But in that case the bottleneck is probably you reviewing code, right? Which, I bet, is faster than writing code. But you probably won’t get the trul…

Yeah, I guess that's kinda my point. LLM detractors on HN seem to straw-man what they think the average LLM user is doing. I'm an experienced programmer who is using an LLM as a speed boost, and the result of that is that it produces thousands of lines of code in a short time.

The impressive thing isn't merely that it produces thousands of lines of code, it's that I've reviewed the code, it's pretty good, it works, and I'm getting use out of the resulting project.

> What would you say is your multiplier, in terms of throughly reviewing code vs writing it from scratch?

I'd say about 10x. More than that (and closer to 100x) if I'm only giving the code a cursory glance (sometimes I just look at the git diff, it looks pretty damned reasonable to me, and I commit it without diving that deep into the review. But I sometimes do something similar when reviewing coworkers' code!)

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#145

Post by andrew_eu »

Sytten wrote: post #56

I am a caveman, I don't understand the need for a personal assistant. What are you guys using it for?

I set one up to have a shared chat with my partner about our dog. E.g. schedule reminders, tracking food in a spreadsheet, etc.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#146

Post by rubslopes »

Sytten wrote: post #56

I am a caveman, I don't understand the need for a personal assistant. What are you guys using it for?

Tools like OpenClaw have two core capabilities: the ability to rewrite themselves, and the ability to independently figure out how to connect to different services and establish those connections.

Yesterday, I was responding to a client ticket about what I knew wasn't a bug. It was something the client had requested themselves. The product is complex, constantly evolving, and has spawned dozens of related Jira tickets over time. So I asked my agent to explore the git history, identify changes to that specific feature, and cross-reference them with comments across the related tickets. Within minutes, I had everything I needed to write a clear response. It even downloaded PDF and DOCX files the client had attached. All of this was possible because my agent is connected to GitHub and Jira, and can clone repos locally since it runs on a VPS.

A second example: I was in an online meeting, taking notes as we went. Afterward, I asked the agent to pull the meeting transcript from Fireflies and use it to enrich my notes in Obsidian. I could have also asked it to push my action items straight into Todoist.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#148

Post by dannymi »

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'm only using NanoClaw, but I like that I could (and did) just review the code it has, and that it uses containers for each agent (so I can have different WhatsApp groups working on different things and they can't interfere with each other), and that I could (and did) just swap those containers out easily for guix shell containers.

I am pretty confident that I know how the agent containerization works. In general there's really not a lot of complexity there at all.

If one wants, one can just (ask Claude to) add whatever functionality, or (and that's what I did) just use Claude skills (without adapting NanoClaw any further) and be done with.

What is annoying is that their policy is instead of integrating extra functionality upstream, they prefer you to keep it for yourself. That means I have to either not update from upstream or I am the king of the (useless so far--just rearranging the deck chairs) merge conflicts every single time. So one of the main reasons for contributing to upstream is gone and you keep having to re-integrate stuff into your fork.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#149

Post by ruszki »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #137
ruszki wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how some people decide here, who the good programmers are. A lot of people reminded me a guy from West Palm Beach, who votes on elections solely on the principle of who has more "fame". Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all. So I always interpreted his words with a hefty amount of grain of salt. And sometimes som…

> Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all. pg wrote a Lisp dialect, Arc, with Morris. The Morris from "the Morris worm". These people are at the very least hackers and they definitely know how to code. I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect. At least of all the "not good" programmers I met in my life, 0% of th…

I met a coder, who has several self made programming languages, and I would never allow him anywhere near any codebases for which I'm responsible. So writing a Lisp dialect, is not something which makes you a good coder for sure. Even as a junior you can do that. Making it good, and be able to really reason for choices is a different story. I've never seen any good new reasoning from Graham like for example how Dan Abramov do all the time. They are not even close, and definitely not in favor of Graham.

Re: Don't trust AI agents

#150

Post by aerhardt »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #137
ruszki wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how some people decide here, who the good programmers are. A lot of people reminded me a guy from West Palm Beach, who votes on elections solely on the principle of who has more "fame". Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all. So I always interpreted his words with a hefty amount of grain of salt. And sometimes som…

> Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all. pg wrote a Lisp dialect, Arc, with Morris. The Morris from "the Morris worm". These people are at the very least hackers and they definitely know how to code. I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect. At least of all the "not good" programmers I met in my life, 0% of th…

I take him to be a good programmer on top of a pioneer venture capitalist and entrepreneur but Hackers and Painters contains some pretty bad predictions and takes on programming, and if he didn't have that good foresight then, it has probably become worse with the years.
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