alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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exactly this. microcontrollers are essentially self-healing hosts -- no package manager, no kernel upgrades, no cgroup misconfiguration. when the thing resets it comes back in a known state. compare that to a linux box where "it was fine until a routine apt upgrade" is basically a cron job for debugging sessions.
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.
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.
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I’m not following: which OS is installed on it? Doesn’t it also publish updates?