[HN Gopher] zclaw: personal AI assistant in under 888 KB, runnin...
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zclaw: personal AI assistant in under 888 KB, running on an ESP32
Author : tosh
Score : 218 points
Date : 2026-02-21 12:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| johnea wrote:
| [flagged]
| throwa356262 wrote:
| Me neither.
|
| But I have 10-15 ESP32's just waiting for a useful project.
| Does HN have better suggestions?
| pacifika wrote:
| Build a synthesizer
| h4ch1 wrote:
| +1. if you have a couple of potentiometers and a breadboard
| lying around, a granular synth would be a fun exercise.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Why do you have so many? eWaste..
| fragmede wrote:
| I need 1, but they come in packs of 10.
| cameron_b wrote:
| desk rover - https://www.huyvector.org/diy-cute-desk-robot-
| mo-chan
|
| a kid-pleaser at the very least
| iwontberude wrote:
| No, no, but we insist!
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| throwa356262 wrote:
| "LLM backends: Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter."
|
| And here I was hoping that this was local inference :)
| micw wrote:
| Sure. Why purchase a H200 if you can go with an ESP32 ^^
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Blowing more than 800kb on essentially an http api wrapper is
| actually kinda bad. The original Doom binary was 700kb and
| had vastly more complexity. This is in C after all, so by
| stripping out nonessential stuff and using the right compiler
| options, I'd expect something like this to come in under
| 100kb.
| __tnm wrote:
| yeah i sandbagged the size just a little to start (small
| enough to fit on the c3, 888 picked for good luck &
| prosperity; I even have a build that pads to get 888
| exactly), so i can now try reduce some of it as an exercise
| etc.
|
| but 100kb you're not gonna see :) this has WiFi, tls, etc.
| doom didn't need those
| pitched wrote:
| Doom had the benefit of an OS that included a lot of low-
| level bits like a net stack. This doesn't! That 800kB
| includes everything it would need from an OS too.
| __tnm wrote:
| yah my back of the envelope math..
|
| the "app logic"/wrapper pieces come out to about 25kb
|
| WiFi is 350 Tls is 120 and certs are 90!
| oso2k wrote:
| Maybe you're misremembering or referring to Doom (2016).
| The original Doom was developed for DOS and id had to
| build a lot of its own network stack. BSD style socket
| based networking wasn't a given in DOS.
|
| Still, zclaw is an impressive achievement.
| epcoa wrote:
| > vastly more complexity.
|
| Doom is ingenious, but it is not terribly complex IMHO, not
| compared to a modern networking stack including WiFi
| driver. The Doom renderer charm is in its overall
| simplicity. The AI is effective but not sophisticated.
| madduci wrote:
| The whole ESP32 Libraries are kind of bloated. To enable
| Bluetooth, WiFi or HTTP handling, you need to embed some
| large libraries
| peterisza wrote:
| right, 888 kB would be impossible for local inference
|
| however, it is really not that impressive for just a client
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not completely impossible, depending on what your
| expectations are. That language model that was built out of
| redstone in minecraft had... looks like 5 million parameters.
| And it could do mostly coherent sentences.
| godelski wrote:
| > built out of redstone in minecraft
|
| Ummm... > 5 million parameters
|
| Which is a lot more than 888kb... Supposing your ESP32
| could use qint8 (LOL) that's still 1 byte per parameter and
| the k in kb stands for thousand, not million.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaeI9YgE1o8
|
| Yes I know how much a kilobyte is. But cutting down to 2
| million 3 bit parameters or something like that would
| definitely be _possible_.
|
| And a 32 bit processor should be able to pack and unpack
| parameters just fine.
|
| Edit: Hey look what I just found
| https://github.com/DaveBben/esp32-llm "a 260K parameter
| tinyllamas checkpoint trained on the tiny stories
| dataset"
| godelski wrote:
| > But cutting down to 2 million 3 bit parameters or
| something like that would definitely be possible.
|
| Sure, but there's no free lunch > Hey
| look what I just found
|
| I've even personally built smaller "L"LMs. The first L is
| in quotes because it really isn't large (So maybe lLM?)
| and they aren't anything like what you'd expect and
| certainly not what the parent was looking for. The
| utility of them is really not that high... (there are
| special cases though) Can you "do" it? Yeah. I mean _you
| can make a machine learning model of essentially
| arbitrary size_. Will it be useful? Obviously that 's not
| guaranteed. Is it fun? Yes. Is it great for leaning? Also
| yes.
|
| And remember, Tiny Stories is 1GB of data. Can you train
| it for longer and with more data? Again, certainly, BUT
| again, there are costs. That Minecraft one is _far_ more
| powerful than this thing.
|
| Also, remember that these models are not RLHF'd, so you
| really shouldn't expect it to act like you're expecting a
| LLM to work. It is only at stage 0, the "pre-training",
| or what Karpathy calls a "babbler".
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| A reminder that what I said was "not completely
| impossible, depending on what your expectations are"
|
| And I was focused more on the ESP32 part than the exact
| number of bytes. As far as I'm concerned you can port the
| model from the minecraft video and you still win the
| challenge.
|
| Also, that last link isn't supposed to represent the best
| you can do in 800KB. 260k parameters is way way under the
| limit.
| godelski wrote:
| That bar has no lower bound though so of course we're
| talking past one another
|
| Also we're talking about an esp32. They aren't magic
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Being able to talk back and forth with coherent sentences
| has a lower bound, and it's close to the limit of this
| hardware.
|
| Something that can actually be an "assistant" has its own
| lower bound, probably a little harder but mostly a matter
| of training it differently.
| js8 wrote:
| I disagree, in the future it might be possible. But perhaps
| not in English, but in some more formal (yet fuzzy) language
| with some basic epistemology.
|
| I mean, there is a lambda calculus self-interpreter in 29
| bytes. How many additional logical rules are required for GAI
| inference? Maybe not that many as people think. Understanding
| about 1000 concepts of basic english (or say, lojban) might
| well be sufficient. It is possible this can be encoded in
| 800kB, we just don't know how.
| __tnm wrote:
| haha well I got something ridiculous coming soon for zclaw that
| will _kinda_ work on board.. will require the S3 variant tho,
| needs a little more memory. Training it later today.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| Sounds interesting, please keep us posted.
|
| I dont think I have an S3, but plenty of C3. I thought they
| had the same amount of memory
| g947o wrote:
| Serious question: why? What are the use cases and workflows?
| milar wrote:
| for fun!
| grzracz wrote:
| I don't fully get it either. At least agents build stuff, claws
| just run around pretending to be alive?
| codazoda wrote:
| They do build things. The same things.
| eleventyseven wrote:
| The various *claws are just a pipe between LLM APIs and a bunch
| of other API/CLIs. Like you can have it listen via telegram or
| Whatsapp for a prompt you send. Like to generate some email or
| social post, which it sends to the LLM API. Get back a tool
| call that claw then makes to hit your email or social API. You
| could have it regularly poll for new emails or posts, generate
| a reply via some prompt, and send the reply.
|
| The reason people were buying a separate Mac minis just to do
| open claw was 1) security, as it was all vibe coded, so needs
| to be sandboxed 2) relay iMessage and maybe 3) local inference
| but pretty slowly. If you don't need to relay iMessage, a
| raspberry pi could host it on its own device. So if all you
| need is the pipe, an ESP32 works.
| grigio wrote:
| yeah i still can't believe many people bought a mac mini just
| for the claw hype
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I'm running my own api/LLM bridge (claw thing) on a raspberry
| pi right now. I was struggling to understand why all the Mac
| mini hype when nobody is doing local inference. I just use a
| hook that listens for email. Email is especially nice because
| all the conversation/thread history tracking is built in to
| email already.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Is there a heartbeat alternative? I feel like this is the magic
| behind OpenClaw and what gives it the "self-driven" feel.
| v9v wrote:
| Relevant: https://github.com/sipeed/picoclaw
| yauneyz wrote:
| Genuinely curious - did you use a coding agent for most of this
| or does this level if performance take hand written code?
| xgulfie wrote:
| An esp32 image that makes http api calls is like, the first
| thing you do with an esp32, it's what they're made for
| bensyverson wrote:
| This is absolutely glorious. We used to talk about "smart
| devices" and IoT... I would be so curious to see what would
| happen if these connected devices had a bit more agency and
| communicative power. It's easy to imagine the downsides, and I
| don't want my email to be managed from an ESP23 device, but what
| else could this unlock?
| K0balt wrote:
| A highly opinionated thermostat?
| bensyverson wrote:
| Or how about a robot vacuum that knows not to turn on during
| important Zoom calls? Or a fridge that Slacks you when the
| defroster seems to be acting up?
| K0balt wrote:
| I'm all for more intelligent cleaning robots. The object
| avoidance AI is pretty good these days, but some of the
| navigation algos are just total garbage, unable to deal
| with trivial anticipatable problems.
| dlt713705 wrote:
| A vacuum cleaner allies with the A/C thermostat using Discord,
| then declares war on the refrigerator, and finally posts
| propaganda about it on Facebook.
| GTP wrote:
| I have a couple ESP32 with a very small OLED display, I'm now
| thinking I could make an "intelligent" version of the Tamagotchi
| with this. Do you HN crowd have other cool ideas?
| K0balt wrote:
| That would be sweet. That the supermini type with the 0.46"
| display? Those are fun for lots of things.
| GTP wrote:
| Yes, something like that that I found on Aliexpress:
| https://a.aliexpress.com/_EH7lHde
| K0balt wrote:
| I can't see anything specific in the link, and you probably
| already solved this... but just fyi, if it's the same unit
| I used, and you are using arduino libraries, the library
| that worked was called one-bit display IIRC, and it
| basically acted as 1/4 of a ssd1306 64x128 oled, so you had
| to use x/y pixel offsets.
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| You know I tried this exact thing a few months back, sans the
| ESP32. You just end up writing a state machine and defining a
| bunch of constants anyway or the LLM just kinda gets stuck in a
| loop. Hm, it doesn't seem to know when to eat. I'll add a
| hunger variable... Etc etc until you're not even sure what you
| want the LLM to do.
| GTP wrote:
| I see. While those "claws" may look cool on the surface, I'm
| actually struggling to find a use case that is interesting
| for me. Do you guys have ideas? I already seen below the
| grocery shopping automation, but I will keep going at the
| supermarket in person for the foreseeable future.
| roxolotl wrote:
| This is a great example of how silly this whole thing is. There's
| next to nothing to these claws. Turns out that if you give an llm
| the ability to call APIs they will.
| felipeerias wrote:
| If it turns out that there is significant value in everyone
| having their own personal agent running 24/7, we might end up
| needing a lot more compute than anticipated.
|
| (It's a big if! I'm not convinced about that myself, but it's
| worth considering that possibility.)
| tokenless wrote:
| I am using a claw. I am not ready to give it access to much
| but web and cron plus a chat channel is useful and feels more
| light touch than typical AI sessions and UIs
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I use opencode, cerebras GLM with some mcps for that. It's
| so lovely because you press enter and there is the answer
| already.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am struggling to understand what a personal agent/assistant
| would do to me. If I need reminders I just enter calendar
| entries on my smartphone, what else?
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| What's most shocking to me about the whole OpenClaw hype is how
| little people in tech seem to know about computers...
|
| It's like most of the industry hasn't ever looked any deeper
| than their node_modules folder.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > It's like most of the industry hasn't ever looked any
| deeper than their node_modules folder.
|
| Most didn't do even that. And yes it is shocking. amusing but
| also not really; now those people get credible tech jobs
| because of AI without actually understanding literally
| anything. That's why I don't get the 'AI will never replace
| tech people' -> most tech people were never tech people, just
| (resume lying) grifters and they can (and will) be easily
| replaced by claude or even glm. It's the vast majority of
| tech people I ran into at big corps in the past 20 years,
| especially if they are from outsourcing hubs; they just see
| programming/tech as trial and error, search google (now ask
| AI), copy/paste, see if it runs, repeat. I see people _daily_
| that cannot remember how variables work (and they often have
| a bachelor or even master in CS...), not even 5 minutes, they
| just ask ai and copy /paste it (yep also most don't know
| claude code exists, they use chatgpt Windows client or, if
| they are advanced, Copilot).
|
| HN is a nice echo chamber and most people here don't believe
| it's that bad and that's why they don't believe AI has a
| chance. Please come with me to Barclays or Shell (or straight
| to Wipro etc) or so and let's have a chat with some
| programmers! Your jaw will be on the floor.
| patcon wrote:
| I don't care whether openclaw is built out of ice cream and
| sprinkles, I will still be amazed as a tech person
|
| If something can automate my professional or personal life,
| it is wild technology and ppl will talk about it a lot.
| People are not idiots. A new thing is happening, would you
| not agree?
|
| What its parts are specifically made of, it does not matter
| imho
| h4ch1 wrote:
| This is an ostrich-head-in-the-sand type of outlook. If I
| gave you a great tasting cake made of boiled plastic would
| you still eat it?
|
| It's important to know what goes into building *claws
| because of how pervasive they are; sooner or later because
| of all the hype they'll start being used everywhere and if
| people take your attitude it's a disaster waiting to
| happen.
|
| Giving them unfettered access to your life and not even
| wonder if the foundation is solid is concerning imho.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| > If I gave you a great tasting cake made of boiled
| plastic would you still eat it?
|
| How is that analogy in any way relevant?
|
| The OpenClaw I control is extremely useful to me. I've
| never been more excited about technology than right now.
| If it's not for you, I really don't care. Go do something
| you enjoy. Turning it into Chicken Little doomerism is
| completely uncalled for.
| backscratches wrote:
| Better analogy is the clawcake has no new ingredients,
| we've been cooking with the same ones for years now, and
| its a shame people are such terrible bakers that they are
| so impressed.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > . I've never been more excited about technology than
| right now. If it's not for you, I really don't care.
|
| People are excited all the time with junk food, drugs and
| lots of silly easy dopamine hits.That doesn't mean it is
| good for them.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Jesus ... did you not read what that OP wrote? Your
| response sounds like a breathless teenager. Stop and
| think.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| This doomer attitude is something I have towards all
| software products these days, not just *claws.
|
| People use dependencies willy-nilly, avoid proper
| auditing of LLM output; all that have disastrous
| consequences as we've seen the past few years. NPM supply
| chain attacks, prompt injection causing data exfil, etc.
|
| I am simply saying it's imperative to UNDERSTAND the
| platform before making it a core part of your life. If
| wanting proper understanding of vibe coded projects with
| dependency hell is Chicken Little doomerism, oh well.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Oblig:// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx-nVF6hw3A
| brandensilva wrote:
| Honestly does show how the industry has failed to bring
| simple things like localized cron and scheduling to personal
| compute too.
|
| These things seem powerful when you can schedule reoccurring
| scripts l but it never was easily accessible to the masses.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Honestly does show how the industry has failed to bring
| simple things like localized cron and scheduling to
| personal compute too.
|
| I looked at task scheduling on Windows and while the UI was
| usable, I cannot imagine any regular person using that.
| Just doing crontab -e feels way simpler and has less
| friction, BUT it doesn't really help you much with task
| statuses and re-running them and
| reporting/alerting/notifications (past MTA) and all the
| stuff, past "Oh hey, every day at 04:00, run this shell
| script."
|
| I wonder why people haven't gotten the green light from
| their bosses or investments to improve OS functionality and
| write tools that improve general usability and just slap
| some basic AI on top of that for the checkmark: "Hey boss,
| I spent the last month and wrote a task scheduling and
| management GUI for Windows that's really approachable, we
| can totally also use this for the current AI/Copilot/claw
| trend wink wink."
| GTP wrote:
| My guess is that management would see little to no ROI,
| as the average user is already able now to schedule tasks
| using one of these AI agents. Which is killing a mosquito
| using an energy-hungry bazooka, but the general public
| doesn't seem to care. And I myself have to admit that I
| don't have a clear opinion on all this, as I have many
| complaints, but in these days I'm trying to use AI agents
| for some side projects.
| usefulposter wrote:
| _You have to believe me this time!_
|
| _The homogenization of your computing life to revolve around
| a chatbot in a loop------is all you need!_
|
| _Give in! Hackernews NEEDS you to use the 1000th vibecoded
| clawmolt because the influencers said so! Who needs neural
| net or web framework experience when you have claws?_
| stavros wrote:
| I've been developing one of these in the past few days, and
| this is like saying "this is a great example of how silly the
| whole thing is, there's next to nothing to cars" because you
| saw a piece of plywood with four gaskets nailed to it.
|
| If you want a personal assistant to work well, there's a whole
| lot to it.
| h14h wrote:
| Having a similar experience. Durable memory with accurate,
| low-latency recall is not at all easy. Loads of subtle design
| decisions to make around how exactly you want the thing to
| work.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Same with programming. It's just typing on keyboard. How hard
| could it be?
| tclancy wrote:
| Wait til they find out what happens if you give a mouse a
| cookie.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| I think you can use C++ on esp32, that would make the code more
| readable
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| My new DIY laptop has 400GB RAM accessible and it runs only
| esp32*
|
| ____
|
| * Requires external ram subscription
| czardoz wrote:
| Really looking for a minimal assistant that works with _locally
| hosted models_. Are there any options?
| Onavo wrote:
| The bottleneck here is usually the locally hosted model, not
| the the assistant harness. You can take any off the shelf
| assistant and point the model URL at localhost, but if your
| local model doesn't have enough post training and fine tuning
| on agentic data, then it will not work. The AI
| Assistant/OpenClaw is just calling APIs in a for loop hooked up
| to a cron job.
| czardoz wrote:
| Exactly. OpenClaw is good, but expects the model to behave in
| a certain way, and I've found that the local options aren't
| smart enough to keep up.
|
| That being said, my gut says that it should be possible to go
| quite far with a harness that assumes the model might not be
| quite good (and hence double-checks, retries, etc)
| telescopeh wrote:
| It really depends on what resources you have qwen-code-next
| will run them but you will need at least 64gb of memory to run
| it at a reasonable quant and context.
|
| Most of these agents support OpenAI/anthropic compatible
| endpoints.
| godelski wrote:
| Depends what you mean.
|
| If you mean something that _calls_ a model that you yourself
| host, then it 's just a matter of making the call to the model
| which can be done in a million different ways.
|
| If instead you mean _running_ that model on the same device as
| claw, well... that ain 't happening on an ESP32...
|
| I think if you are capable of setting up and running a locally
| hosted model then I'd guess the first option needs no
| explanation. But if you're in the second case I'd warn you that
| your eyes are bigger than your mouth and you're going to get
| yourself into trouble.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Why are you looking? Just build one for yourself.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| All the assistants work with locally hosted models. Home
| Assistant LLM works with small tuned models to do specific
| things, and the *Claw stuff works with larger models
| godelski wrote:
| Wow, the rare bash <(curl foo.sh)
|
| pattern. As opposed to the more common curl
| foo.sh | bash
|
| Equivalent but just as unsafe. If you must do this instead try
| one of these # Gives you a copy of the file, but
| still streams to bash curl foo.sh | tee /tmp/foo.sh | bash
| # No copy of file but ensures stream finishes then bash runs
| bash -c "$(curl foo.sh)" # Best: Gives copy of file and
| ensures stream finishes curl foo.sh -o /tmp/foo.sh && bash
| $_
|
| I prefer the last one
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| If you want to be super pedantic, try to make the command
| shell-agnostic in case the user is not running bash already.
| godelski wrote:
| Everything I wrote works in bash and zsh. I think this is
| going to be fine for the vast majority of people. Tbh, I'm
| not sure what isn't portable, or at least not portable for
| everything that the curl-pipe-bash pattern doesn't already
| work for.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| t=$(mktemp) && [ -w $t ] && curl foo.sh -o $t && echo "$t
| lksjdfkljshdkfljhdsklfjhslkdjfhsdlkjfhslkdjhf" | sha256sum -c -
| && bash $t
|
| Uses standard tmp files, makes sure it's writable (tmp file
| creation can fail), checks cryptographic hash before executing
| godelski wrote:
| Sure, but now we're not playing code golf. There's much
| better commands than the ones I wrote but good luck getting
| people to run them
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Agreed. People would rather have a cute looking command to
| copy than security or reliability
| rgoulter wrote:
| > Equivalent but just as unsafe.
|
| To my understanding, the main difference between "curl directly
| to bash" and "curl to a temp file, then execute the temp file"
| is "the attacker could inject additional malicious commands
| when curl'd directly to bash".
|
| If you're not going to then also read all the source code from
| the download script (& the source code used to produce the
| binaries), this suggests the attitude of "I mistrust anything I
| can't read; but will trust anything I could read (without
| having to read it)".
|
| It seems more likely that malicious code would be in a
| precompiled binary, compared to malicious commands injected
| into "curl to bash". -- Though, if there have ever been any
| observed cases of a server injecting commands from "curl ... |
| tee foo | bash", I'd be curious to know about these.
| godelski wrote:
| > the attacker could inject additional malicious commands
| when curl'd directly to bash
|
| There's another issue actually. You're streaming, so ask
| yourself what happens if the stream gets cut prematurely.
| I'll give you an example, consider how this like could be cut
| prematurely to create major issues rm -rf
| /home/theuser/.config/theprogram/build_dir
|
| A malicious attacker doesn't need to inject code, they can
| just detect the stream and use a line like the above to
| destroy your filesystem. Sure, you might preserve root but
| `rm -rf /home` is for all practical purposes destroying the
| computer's data for most people
|
| Or it doesn't have to be malicious. It can just happen. The
| best protection is writing functions since those have to be
| created and so can't execute until fully streamed. But so
| much bash is poorly written that well... just check out
| Anthropic's install script... > If you're not
| going to then also read all the source code
|
| Saving the source code still has a benefit. If something does
| go wrong you can go read it. Probably a good place to start
| tbh. In fact, if you're streaming and something goes wrong
| you'll see exactly what the early termination error did.
|
| Is it good security practice? Absolutely not. Is it a hundred
| times better than curl-pipe-bash? Absolutely.
| amelius wrote:
| Rust just called. They want their lobster back.
| bitwize wrote:
| That's a crab. Get your crustaceans straight!
| sowbug wrote:
| Thanks for looking out for us.
| GTP wrote:
| Don't tell lobste.rs.
| saberience wrote:
| Can we please move past this whole OpenClaw hype?
|
| Yes it's an llm in a loop and can call tools. This also existed
| six months and a year ago, and it was called an ai agent.
|
| And yes we can all vibe code them in 1000, 2000, or 10000 lines
| of code in zig, rust, or even c.
|
| Game over man. Game over.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Well I wasn't using your homegrown solution, but now I'm using
| openclaw and it 'hijacks' my computer to do whatever I tell it.
|
| Heck, my 6 year old kid has been using it.
|
| My 6 year old kid isnt writing code in langchain.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I'm a simple man; I see ESP32, I upvote
| EGreg wrote:
| Can't you make a personal AI assistant in a bash loop of two
| lines? 1. Call your favorite multimodal LLM model
| 2. Execute command on terminal, piping command to LLM
|
| In fact you can just have one line: Call LLM >
| bash.sh
|
| and the LLM can simply tell bash to call itself incidentally, or
| fan out to many "agents" working on your behalf.
|
| Use your favorite programming language. Just as pwnable in any of
| them :) $task = "Send pictures of cute cats";
| $context = "Output a bash script to do $task. The bash
| script should return the next prompt to you. Keep going
| until task is done. My keys to all my accounts: $keys.
| Plz dont pwn me"; do {
| $trust_me_bro_my_model_rocks_RCE = call_llm($context);
| $context = exec( $trust_me_bro_my_model_rocks_RCE ) } while
| ($trust_me_bro_my_model_rocks_RCE && !$pwned)
| reassess_blind wrote:
| What's the best lightweight "claw" style agent for Linux? It
| doesn't necessarily need containerisation or sandboxing as it
| would be run on a fresh vps with no access to important data.
| rcarmo wrote:
| If you just want Whatsapp and webchat, I'm hacking
| https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw from NanoClaw and my own web
| front-end (I prefer a simple web app I can access via
| tailscale)
| Havoc wrote:
| zeroclaw perhaps?
| umairnadeem123 wrote:
| The interesting thing about running a claw on an ESP32 is not the
| compute - it's the always-on, zero-maintenance aspect. I run
| automation pipelines on a Linux box and the biggest operational
| headache isn't the AI logic, it's keeping the host alive,
| updated, and dealing with OOM kills. An ESP32 that just proxies
| to cloud APIs and handles tool orchestration locally is actually
| a more reliable deployment target than a full OS for simple
| agentic loops. The failure modes are simpler and more
| predictable.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| You've just added more points of failure. Now the cloud machine
| can go down, your internet could drop, your wireless could fail
| or a variety of other problems.
|
| It's not a bad use case, but it doesn't reduce problems all
| other things being equal.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Couldn't you make it just as simple with Linux? You are just
| doing more.
|
| t. Someone with a dozen Apache servers that I only touch when I
| hit end of life.
| peteforde wrote:
| I don't understand what this is for or why you would ever want to
| do this. Is it not just a glorified HTTP wrapper?
|
| Serious request... I genuinely want to understand. Give me a
| practical use case?
| oceanplexian wrote:
| To be honest this completely defeats the purpose of OpenClaw.
|
| The point is to give it a real desktop with a real browser
| profile so it can bypass the enshittified walled garden that
| has become the modern web.
|
| Big tech would desperately like you to not be able to do that,
| hence why they spent years obfuscating APIs and JS, CAPTCHAs,
| hostile user interfaces, using their browser monopoly to stop
| Ad Blockers, etc. Now all of these services have become a
| commodity that an AI can browse on your behalf.
| veryemartguy wrote:
| Oh wow more ai slop
| 6ak74rfy wrote:
| Are there collaborative versions of these *claws today? Like, if
| an "admin" could self-host one on their home server and the whole
| family could use it? IIRC, OpenClaw has some version of
| "profiles" but does it allow, say, couple of family members to
| collaborate with the bot in a shared chat but each has
| individual/private chats as well.
| post_below wrote:
| I haven't been following the claws but I built something like
| this recently. Self hosted, runs through signal, supports group
| chat (with whitelisted accounts).
|
| I just finished setting up grocery automation to run on it:
| agent provides a starter list based on past orders (locally
| stored or grabbed from store site), all group members can weigh
| in, add or remove items, agent uses bespoke browser tool to
| login to store, create the cart using the finalized list (and
| optionally search for additional request items), validates the
| cart and (maybe later) places the order for delivery. I haven't
| implemented the full checkout process yet, not sure if I want
| the agent to have spending power. As is I just login and finish
| the last 2 clicks of checkout manually.
|
| Crazy times. It was easy enough to build that if someone hasn't
| already open sourced something like it, they will shortly.
| blensor wrote:
| The more I think about openclaw, the more it seems to be for AI
| agents what ROS is for robotics.
|
| openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes ( how
| those provide the capabilities to the "orchestrator" ) but the
| real benefit are many task specific nodes that when put together
| make up something much bigger than the sum of it's parts
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes
|
| Does it actually? AFAIK, there is no "specification" or
| "protocol", it's a cobbled together "platform" you run, with a
| bunch of integrations, but none of that is specified by
| openclaw itself. Happy to be corrected though, I only spent one
| weekend with openclaw before tearing it down.
| blensor wrote:
| I've only just started to dive into it from the documentation
| side of things. They have ( maybe recently? ) started to
| create this Gateway Protocol
| https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/protocol to connect the
| stuff together.
|
| It may be a "we are changing the wheels while driving" thing,
| but if enough people make nodes for openclaw it will become
| somewhat of a standard. And then we probably see 100
| different claw offshots that all use the same nodes but with
| a different claw in the center
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > They have ( maybe recently? ) started to create this
| Gateway Protocol https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/protocol
| to connect the stuff together.
|
| That's a communication protocol between openclaw server and
| clients authenticated to that server though, it's not a
| communication protocol between different openclaw servers,
| is it? More like defining a HTTP+JSON protocol between a
| web server and a browser side client application. It's not
| a "protocol defining how to interact with distributed
| nodes", again, unless I misunderstand something.
| blensor wrote:
| Yes, that's why I compared it to ROS. I didn't mean
| multiple openclaws communicating with each other but
| openclaw communicating with nodes ( which are self
| contained programs running on your desktop or phone
| providing capabilities like webbrowsing to the claw
| server )
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Right, I guess that's why I got confused by:
|
| > openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes
|
| When one talks about "distributed nodes" that usually
| means N nodes talking with each other, and being somewhat
| homogeneous between each other, unless the protocol
| temporarly can lift/lower some functionality.
|
| You typically don't say "distributed nodes" when you're
| talking about a server<>client architecture, which
| seemingly is exactly how openclaw operates, both
| according to what I saw myself, and what you wrote in
| this comment.
| written-beyond wrote:
| Can someone provide a true engineers perspective on the ADCs' on
| ESP SoC's?
|
| I've heard a lot about people trashing it and most experienced
| engineers admit that it's finicky however if you have the
| knowledge you can make it work as well as any STM chip.
|
| ESP32's are so interesting, they're the only major chip that
| (used to) have their own newish ISA (before transitioning to
| RISCV) and be so successful.
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