Run NanoClaw in Docker Sandboxes

They may seem like small details, but I think a couple novel design decisions are going to prove to be widely adopted and revolutionary.

The biggest one (as Karpathy notes) is having skills for how to write a (slack, discord, etc) integration, instead of shipping an implementation for each.

Call it “Claude native development” if you will, but “fork and customize” instead of batteries-included platforms/frameworks is going to be a big shift when it percolates through the ecosystem.

A bunch of things you need to figure out, eg how do you ship a spec for how to test and validate the thing, make it secure, etc.

How long before OSs start evolving in this way? You can imagine Auto research-like sharing and promotion upstream of good fixes/approaches, but a more heterogenous ecosystem could be more resistant to attacks if each instance had a strong immune system.

You must explicitly state what your threat model is when writing about security tooling, isolation, and sandboxing.

This threat model is concerned with running arbitrary code generated by or fetched by an AI agent on host machines which contain secrets, sensitive files, and/or exfoliate data, apps, and systems which should not be lost.

What about the threat model where an agent deletes your entire inbox? Or sends your calendar events to a server after prompt injection? Bank transfers of the wrong amount to the wrong address etc. all these are allowed under the sandboxing model.

We need fine grained permissions per-task or per-tool in addition to sandboxing. For example: "this request should only ever read my gmail and never write, delete, or move emails".

Sandboxes do not solve permission escalation or exfiltration threats.

I like NanoClaw a lot. I found OpenClaw to be a bloated mess, NanoClaw implementation is so much tighter.

It's also the first project I've used where Claude Code is the setup and configuration interface. It works really well, and it's fun to add new features on a whim.

> Fine-grained permissions and policies. Not just what tools an agent can access, but what it can do with them. Read email but not send. Access one repo but not another. Spend up to a threshold but no more.

If nailed this is going to be interesting.

All the other solutions I've been sumbling around are either very hard to customize or too limited.

Docker sandboxing is kinda nice, but not enough to trust an LLM even with my messaging accounts.

Docker sandboxes sound exactly like what Apple is doing with their `container` framework. It's missing several Docker features still, but if I were to pick a minimal, native runtime, it would probably be that, not the multi-gigabyte monster that is Docker for macOS.

On Linux, however, I absolutely don't want a hypervisor on my quite underpowered single-board server. Linux namespaces are enough for what I want from them (i.e. preventing one of these agent harnesses to hijack my memory, disk, or CPU). I wonder why neither OpenClaw nor NanoClaw seem to offer a sanely configured, prebuilt, and frequently updated Docker image?

The main issue is not so much if it needs to run inside a container or not (and to be honest there are even better isolation models, why not firecracker vm). The main issue is what are you going to do with it.

It does not really matter.

IMHO, until you figure out useful ways to spend tokens to do useful tasks the runtime should be a second thought.

As far as security goes, running LLM in a container in just simply not enough. What matters is not what files it can edit on your machine but what information it can access. And the access in this case as far as these agents are concerned is basically everything. If this does not scare you you should not be thinking about containers.

I've been working on a similar idea to the "claws" but rather than integrating with messaging apps, just make the TUI available e2e encrypted where-ever you are. https://wingthing.ai/ / https://github.com/ehrlich-b/wingthing

I've been thinking about how docker support would work, so I'll check this out!

What I found interesting is nanoclaw isn’t a working product out of the box. You must use a coding agent to complete it with features you want. For example add iMessage support, etc.

In other words, Claude is the compiler.

What are the most obvious use cases for Nano/Open-Claw. I can't imagine anything obvious that I'd want to use it for. Is it supposed to run your digital life for you?

Docker sandboxes are a neat way to contain AI agents. It spins a dedicated microVM and its Docker daemon for each agent container together with a flexible egress proxy to go with it. I've spent some time reverse engineering it and it's an interesting piece of implementation.

I hope they never drop the Apple container mode. I vastly prefer it because of the lower overhead on limited RAM.

It would be interesting to have nanoclaw adapted to the Pi coding agent rather than Claude Code, which would combine two minimalist approaches.

As an aside, app descriptions that just say "a lightweight alternative to X" are very unhelpful. That tells me nothing if I don't know what X does, and I don't want to have to go down a rabbit hole just to understand your product. It's particularly bad in this case, because even OpenClaw's Github page doesn't clearly tell me what it actually does; just that it's some kind of assistant that I can communicate with via WhatsApp etc. I appreciate that many people are already familiar with OpenClaw, but you shouldn't assume.

It's better if your app's description just tells me what it does in a direct way using plain language. It's fine to tell me it's an alternative to something, but that should be in addition to rather than instead of your own description.

I love how NanoClaw looks, but I simply can't bring myself to give Israeli software like this access to any of my systems.

Does getviktor use NanoClaw?

The next step to this is using a better tool to access containers (BuildKit), like Dagger, where you can track every step as a new container layer, time travel, share via registries...

This has been my setup since early this year, not even that much code: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_next/lib/agent/se...

The bigger effort is making it play nice with vscode so you can browse and edit the files and diffs.

All the sandboxing stuff is neat but the weakest link in these claw setups is not root access on the machine but root access to your life (Gmail, calendar, etc)