From zero to NanoClaw (Interview)

Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw and co-founder of NanoCo, joins Adam to explain how a 40-hour weekend project became a viral open source hit and the foundation of an enterprise AI company. Gavriel describes the security concerns that led him to build a small, container-isolated alternative to OpenClaw, why he released it under the MIT license, and why the project’s community and credibility are more valuable than keeping its code private.

They explore the shift from writing code to architecting the environments in which agents work, NanoClaw’s “skills over features” approach, the approval and governance layers required inside large companies, and a future where every worker manages agents without surrendering human judgment. They close with the technical simplicity behind NanoClaw, containers, TypeScript, SQLite, and a two-database design, and Adam’s case for durable Agent Flow artifacts that keep organizational context from disappearing into chat.

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Featuring:

• Gavriel Cohen – LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

NanoClaw and NanoCo

• NanoClaw
• NanoClaw on GitHub
• NanoClaw design philosophy and README
• NanoClaw customization with skills and recipes
• NanoClaw v2 two-database session design
• NanoCo

Agent projects and models

• OpenClaw
• OpenClaw on GitHub
• Hermes Agent
• Claude Fable 5

Containers and databases

• Apple container
• Docker Sandboxes
• SQLite write-ahead logging
• Turso
• libSQL

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!