NanoClaw Creator Lands Docker Deal After Six Weeks

“It has been an absolutely crazy six weeks for the creator of NanoClaw by Gavriel Cohen. He created this tool basically in 48 hours on his couch, and it has now led six weeks later to going completely viral and creating and having a deal with Docker. So today on the podcast, I want to break down his story, how he built this product, what it does.”

“A few weeks later, after he made, you know, a post, Andrew Carpathy, of course, the famous AI researcher, was saying, you know, like, hey, this thing's pretty cool. It went super viral when he did that. He posted on X. And this basically put it in front of thousands of developers. And from all the attention that that got, it got more than 22,000 GitHub stars. It had 4,600 forks and dozens and dungeons of contributions and collaborations on like new features that people wanted to add to it.”

“while he was kind of looking at some of the performance issues, he realized that OpenClaw's agents had downloaded all of his WhatsApp messages and then stored them locally as plain unencrypted text, which right? I mean, these are WhatsApp is famous for being encrypted and now you got them all as unencrypted texts, you know, just stored on your device. And so I think not just, you know, his work messages, it had authorized that he like told it, you know, it had authorization to access. Apparently, it had actually went and downloaded his entire messaging history.”

“He took what was 800,000 lines of code and he brought it down to 500 and was really just trying to create an absolutely minimal and secure alternative to OpenClaw. And so that's what he built with NanoClaw. I mean, that is insane. 800,000 lines of code down to 500 It was a super stripped down framework. It was written very, very concise. And so instead of relying on this kind of massive dependency tree, it used containerized environments that would isolate AI agents and then strictly control what data they could access.”

“last week, Cohen actually shut down the AI marketing startup that he launched with his brother Lazar. And he is focusing exclusively on NanoClaw. So he had something else going, realized this thing had so much momentum, he shut that down. Right now, both of them are building a company around the project called NanoCo.”

“this is usually how these open-source projects go, right? Because technically open-source means they're giving the code away. Anyone can use it for free or kind of with a license. I mean, there's different ways you can do open-source. But you really are trying to give this away for other people to use. But you typically will create a company around it where you host it on your own server and usually have an API. And if people don't want to kind of run it on their own hardware, they can still get access to it through you.”