[HN Gopher] Zclaw - The 888 KiB Assistant
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Zclaw - The 888 KiB Assistant
Author : kristianpaul
Score : 71 points
Date : 2026-02-28 00:47 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (zclaw.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (zclaw.dev)
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| There is the same divide starting to form that NFTs had back in
| the day. Tech bros instantly like if something has claw in the
| name, the rest of us will dismiss anything with that naming and
| philosophy as toxic slop culture. will be interesting to see how
| far this one will go.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Is Clawcoin a thing yet?
| selectodude wrote:
| You know it.
|
| https://phantom.com/tokens/solana/GzqSGShBevWmjSW3zwe8RmtUzb.
| ..
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The domain crashed and burned or something, hopefully this link
| is correct:
|
| https://github.com/tnm/zclaw
| tehsauce wrote:
| "888 KiB Assistant" but the assistant itself is a multi terabyte
| rental-only model stored in some mysterious data center.
| amelius wrote:
| I'm getting "serverless" flashbacks.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| It seems to support connecting to your own LLM on the same LAN
| dheera wrote:
| I tried connecting OpenClaw to ollama with a V100 running
| qwen3.5:35b but it was really, really, really slow (despite
| ollama itself feeling fairly fast).
|
| These "claw" agents really multiply the tokens used by an
| obscenely huge factor for the same request.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| i recently decided to get into this ocean boiling game too,
| the 32GB V100 seems like a pretty good VRAM/$. if i may
| ask, do you make any special accommodations for cooling?
| i've never dealt with a passively cooled card before and
| i'm curious whether my workstation fans (HP Z840) will be
| sufficient. i'm going to try 2 cards at first but i think i
| might be able to squeeze a third in there
| croes wrote:
| The point is the agent is still the LLM. No LLM, no agent.
| kristianpaul wrote:
| My model is at home... just 16Gb still a lot but just FYI
| gas9S9zw3P9c wrote:
| I fail to understand why 888 KiB matters if it's just a wrapper
| around a cloud api.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Because it means you can run it on an ESP32 which is a low
| power microprocessor package.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Have you seen OpenClaw's codebase? 680.000 LOC.
|
| I care how big it is.
| mihaelm wrote:
| Because of resource-constrained environments, the primary
| deployment target seem to be microcontrollers. You can get
| ESP32 boards for pretty cheap.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| A lot of the *claws emphasize binary size and lines of code. I
| think for better or worse people treat codebase size as a proxy
| for "how much of the project is unsupervised, unmaintainable,
| buggy AI slop?"
| boznz wrote:
| 8 is lucky number in China
| karolcodes wrote:
| 1. why
| rvz wrote:
| 2. hype
| dpe82 wrote:
| 2. fun
| amelius wrote:
| Me: "GPIO 5 can be active for a maximum of 100ms, then it needs
| to cool down for at least 1s. Otherwise the MOSFET is fried."
|
| Zclaw: "GPIO 5 is active now, however the server is not
| responding so I'm awaiting further instructions."
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| There are many concerns and areas for improvement with open claw
| and other similar projects (continuous loop script with broad OS
| access that manages your agents and interfaces with a standard
| messaging app)
|
| However, file size I have never seen on that list. I would rather
| offer for something that is even bigger in file size so it afford
| certain functionality like better security tighter permissions
| however it would do that.
| mihaelm wrote:
| File size is a legit property to keep in mind if your goal is
| to create an agent that runs on ESP32 boards. They don't expect
| you to run Zclaw on Mac Mini.
| allthetime wrote:
| What's the use case for running this on a tiny board? Isn't
| the whole point that it can use your computer for you?
| markstos wrote:
| The examples seem to suggest it would be chatting with your
| home automation in natural language.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Before you know it your smart thermostat will be
| blogging. The joke is on everyone who thought IoT
| couldn't get any worse. Just imagine the new landscape of
| security vulnerabilities this opens up.
| markstos wrote:
| My "smart" gas stove can be turned on over the internet
| (if I allow it to connect)--perfect appliance to put an
| LLM in charge of.
| mihaelm wrote:
| For something like OpenClaw yes, but not for Zclaw. I think
| the naming is more about riding the current wave of Claw-
| related interest rather than positioning it as competition
| or replacement for other _clawies_.
|
| Zclaw is about running an agent in your embedded system.
| stavros wrote:
| I made a secure one:
|
| https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot
|
| Everything runs in containers (I run it on a server along with
| everything else), plugins have a permission system so eg the AI
| can read emails but not delete or send, etc.
|
| I really like it, I run it as my main agent and it has been
| extremely helpful.
| croes wrote:
| Part of the usefulness is based on the same thing that makes
| it so dangerous.
|
| If it can only read but not act, it's safer but less useful.
| stavros wrote:
| I can't restrict OpenClaw if I don't need the extra
| capabilities. I can restrict this.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| Clicked on this expecting to see a crontab file.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Still lightyears from a one-bit AI assistant. Send 1 to save the
| humankind, 0 to exterminate. And hurry up because it's in
| undefined state right now!
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| For people who don't get this: it's a Home Assistant type thing.
| You don't do inference on it, you send it a message on Telegram
| and it does things with physical things through GPIO. You could
| use a $140 Raspberry Pi with 8GB RAM and host a local model on it
| plugged into 30W AC power... or you could use a $10 ESP32 which
| can run for weeks on a tiny battery, and your existing Wifi
| connection with a cheap cloud model (cloud models are as cheap as
| $0.02/1MTokens). This makes it easier to ramp up on new ESP32
| projects. You can just tell it to do things / give you info,
| rather than having to write code.
| newswasboring wrote:
| The model can be taken care of in cloud but hardware also
| depends upon what we want to do right? If we want to run some
| lightweight python scripts etc, we cant use ESP32 right?
| jcgrillo wrote:
| dope so i can hook it up to my appliances, hvac, etc? maybe
| it'll do rad things with my smart doorlocks, remote car
| starter. can it send my self-driving waymobile to pick up my
| family at the airport too? such wow
| Retr0id wrote:
| 888KiB is quite large, but I see they're including the whole rest
| of the firmware in that number, fair enough. Their actual
| application code weighs only 35,742 bytes, compiled.
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(page generated 2026-03-02 23:01 UTC)