I have never used Nanoclaw or any of the many new projects with claw in their name. It's not a lack of interest or a case where I just haven't adopted generative AI in my own work. Rather, it's fear. Whether reasonable or not, I don't yet believe that generative AI is deterministic enough to give it the level of control that any of these claws allow.
However, my concerns about the technology are overshadowed by something more concerning. Search engine optimization types are up to their old tricks and so google searches for Nanoclaw pull up nanoclaw.net, which is not Nanoclaw's official home page.
The Official Nanoclaw Website Is nanoclaw.dev
The founder of Nanoclaw, published the official Nanoclaw website at Nanoclaw.dev a few weeks ago, has it linked to from the official Nanoclaw repository on Github but the official homepage is not showing up anywhere in searches like 'Nanoclaw'.
Domain squatting is not new and squatting on popular open sources projects has been common for a long time. But this Nanoclaw case is concerning because while one of the sites is only displaying ads, another site using the domain name is actively collecting sign ups. With the sheer amount of control these personal AI assistants can have, this represents a large attack service.
To be clear, this is not meant as a criticism of Nanoclaw's founder. Once these things are in the wild,
It's too late for Nanoclaw's founder to do this and this advice is not meant to belittle. But sometimes, it's worth it to step away from building your product to build a moat around its identity. I know that I am an extreme case, but I like to have websites up for at least six months before I launch anything. Search engines are quite good, but indexing and ranking pages properly takes a lot of time - I'm a big believer in giving search engines a lot of time to figure things out.
As for this particular Nanoclaw case, it sure would be a shame if everyone who reads about this linked to Nanoclaw.dev, which is Nanoclaw's real website. At this point, a solid link graph from old websites might be the only thing the community can do to protect users from anyone running a sign up sheet for an open source project they're not involved in.
Because hey, that's not sketchy at all.