Agents on Big Muddy

The definition of "agent"

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:59:00 -0400

An interesting exchange between Guido van Rossum and Andrej Karpathy a few days ago on Twitter:

Guido van Rossum: I think I finally understand what an agent is. It’s a prompt (or several), skills, and tools. Did I get this right?

Andrej Karpathy: LLM = CPU (data: tokens not bytes, dynamics: statistical and vague not deterministic and precise) Agent = operating system kernel

Testing ZeroClaw, Part 2.5: ZeroClaw is alive!

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:59:00 -0400

Yesterday, I wrote about how the ZeroClaw GitHub repository had been down for two days with little explanation. Earlier today, the project provided a little more information on Twitter:

They flagged our org which is why we’re down. Code is safe and we’re still working, just waiting for @github

Since March 30 (the day after their repo started 404ing), they project has been promising a blog post to explain the situation. As of now, that post is now available:

Over the past few days, a maintainer used aggressive AI automation to review and merge PRs:

Merges went through that shouldn’t have.

In the process of trying to undo the damage, the maintainer’s GitHub account was flagged, which triggered enforcement actions on the ZeroClaw org itself.

That maintainer has been removed from the project.

This sounds strikingly similar to the incident that occurred about a month ago, which I also mentioned in yesterday’s post:

Earlier today, during routine maintenance, the visibility of the ‎`zeroclaw-labs/zeroclaw` repository was accidentally changed from public to private and was later restored to public.

After reviewing the GitHub API audit logs and collecting detailed feedback from our engineers, we confirmed that the incident was caused by improper use of an AI agent tool during maintenance.

Obviously, the use agentic workflows in open source projects is an emerging field where best practices have not yet been established. The case of ZeroClaw should be a warning to other projects to keep human review in the loop, or at least to limit the autonomy of agents when a project has numerous contributors. As they say in their blog post:

Testing ZeroClaw, Part 2: ZeroClaw is dead?

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:57:00 -0400

Earlier this month, I wrote about setting up one of the many lightweight OpenClaw alternatives, namely ZeroClaw. I had some issues with initial setup, but I got to the point where I could talk with my bot over Telegram.

Some of my initial enthusiasm for ZeroClaw was dampened by the divergence between the docs and the features available in the release build. The release build was quite out of date due to the breakneck pace of development. In the week or two following my initial setup, the release build pipeline was broken, so even when they released a new tag, there were no new precompiled binaries available. Being forced to compile the Rust binary yourself kind of goes against the project’s philosophy of ultra-low resource consumption.

They eventually fixed the release pipeline and I started casually working on a system where I could send notes and ideas for blog posts to my bot through Telegram and have it turn them into structured Markdown files.

But two days ago (March 29), I noticed that the ZeroClaw GitHub repo was 404ing. On the same day, the project posted the following on Twitter:

Our GitHub repo is currently returning a 404 for some users. We’re aware and actively investigating. The repo is public and all code is safe.

Testing ZeroClaw, Part 1: Setup

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:15:00 -0500

As mentioned last week, I’ve been meaning to test out a personal agent from the Claw-like ecosystem. I settled on testing out Zeroclaw, a popular and lightweight OpenClaw alternative that should run well on my Raspberry Pi 4 4GB.

I wanted to harden my setup as much as possible and opted to running everything in Docker. I started with the official Docker compose file and added my OpenRouter key. I brought up the pre-built container image and tried sending the basic “Hello” message to the agent using the CLI. However, I got error because the automatically generated config file defaulted to a version of Claude Sonnet 4 that wasn’t available on OpenRouter. I switched to claude-sonnet-4.6 and then gpt-oss-20b (for much cheaper testing).

The Zeroclaw web gateway was a bit of a mess. Of the features I tried, only memory management and the basic status dashboard worked. Trying to talk to the agent through the web interface would give me a black screen (here’s someone complaining about the same error). I’m still being charged for the tokens, though! The cost tracker always displayed zero, even as I sent CLI and Telegram messages (more on that soon). The configuration editor gave me an error and so did the diagnostics tool.

The project docs/wiki were helpful for figuring things out, but development is running so far ahead of releases that a bunch of the features referred to aren’t available in the current stable version (v0.1.7, from last week). This includes getting and setting specific config options from the CLI and resetting the gateway pairing token. To use these features, you have to compile yourself.

Agentic engineering patterns

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:15:00 -0500

Simon Willison is building a library of posts covering best practices for using agentic coding tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. The existing articles cover test-driven development (red/green—ensure tests fail before the change and succeed after it) and AI-assisted code walkthroughs.

Comparing the Claw-like agent ecosystem

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:44:00 -0500

Chrys Bader has created ClawCharts to track the popularity and growth of OpenClaw and its growing number of competitors.

I have an unused Raspberry Pi 4 4GB that I’ve been meaning to test one of these Claw-like personal agents on (locked down to prevent the security nightmare scenarios we’ve seen play out since OpenClaw took off).

OpenClaw is a bit of a resource hog (which is why so many people are running out to buy Mac Minis), so I’ve been looking at the list of lightweight competitors. There is no obvious reason to prefer one over the other, so I’ll probably go with the fast-growing ZeroClaw.

ZeroClaw offers OAuth connectors for OpenAI and Anthropic subscription plans, but presently neither company is clear on whether this usage is permissible or not. Anthropic recently blew up the OpenClaw community by updating their docs to specifically ban using OAuth outside of Claude Code. An Anthropic employee partially walked this back on Twitter, but there is still no clear statement whether this use case is permitted. Regarding the use of OAuth from OpenAI for OpenClaw (specifically, GPT Codex), Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, stated on Twitter: “that already works, OAI publicly said that”. No one can seem to find this public statement, but it’s worth noting that Steinberger himself is now an OpenAI employee. So, will you get banned for using your ChatGPT Plus/Pro or Claude Pro/Max subscriptions with OpenClaw? Nobody knows.