I tried openclaw when it was released, but I preferred the minimalism of nanoclaw and replaced it. I have it on a mac mini now

For context: I have additional automation with scripts set up on the mini, some of them call LLMs to do things like summarizing today's news.

I have other automations that are agentic and just run "claude -p" (mainly just checks status of other jobs and fixes them automatically). Agentic automations are great because they can handle unexpected situations (at the cost of predictability). They're all sandboxed and we have control over tools for the most part. Any files it would write to are typically git-controlled so we have change records and rollback built in.

Nanoclaw acts as an agentic layer but combines it with the communication layer over telegram to make it interactive.

I use it to go through my centralized task list (currently beads in my main 'wiki' monorepo), give me nudges for todos, I can also send it pictures of say, food and it will fetch a recipe and sort it into the wiki via a general "inbox" skill (claude has it as well). Every day at 12:30 it will give me a mini "standup" of all my personal projects and todos, and once in a while will give me some thoughts based on my interests.

Its set up to do appropriate tasks with local models to keep token costs down, so far it doesn't seem to cost more than $10-20/mo, it would use less if I didn't drive it with sonnet.

I'm still experimenting with it, and trying to go slow, one thing at a time. I don't give it access to anything super sensitive yet, and try to keep it observable.