Gavriel Cohen, former head of developer relations at Wix, has been making waves lately. After the security incident with OpenClaw, he wrote NanoClaw, a secure replacement with only 500 lines of code. This ambitious local project that started as a 48-hour weekend hack shot to life a few days later when it was featured on Hacker News. The buzz around NanoClaw intensified when renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy posted about it, propelling it into the spotlight and sparking a public discussion between the two on social media platform X.
The culmination of Cohen’s efforts led to a significant announcement: a partnership with Docker to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw. This integration makes for a historic moment for the project. Docker, the company best known for creating container technology, provides the infrastructure that powers NanoClaw. Today thousands of developers use NanoClaw, which is served from its production website at nanoclaw.dev.
The Birth of NanoClaw
Cohen’s inspiration for NanoClaw came from the desire to create a more secure personal AI agent. He explained that available alternatives, especially OpenClaw, had very high-security vulnerabilities. Cohen echoed this sentiment, calling those alternatives “a security nightmare.” During his initial development phase, he recognized the potential of his project:
“There was this big aha moment of: this is the piece that connects all of these separate workflows that I’ve been building.” – Gavriel Cohen
The project took off almost immediately after startup funding, when they published the initial code on Hacker News, where it received tremendous interest from users and developers. As thousands of people started using NanoClaw within days, its immense popularity indicated that there was a massive demand and a need for secure AI tools.
Cohen’s coding journey began casually. He admitted to starting his development in a relaxed manner:
“I sat down on the couch in my sweatpants.” – Gavriel Cohen
This laid-back approach allowed him to focus on what mattered most: crafting a user-friendly and secure platform.
Collaboration with Docker
Cohen’s big break was when Oleg Selajev, a developer at Docker, got in touch to say he’s interested in working on improving NanoClaw. Selajev suggested replacing Apple’s container technology with Docker’s Sandboxes, improving the overall security and functionality of NanoClaw. This partnership is an important achievement for both Cohen and Docker.
This partnership not only brings more resources to Cohen, but underscores Docker’s long-term commitment to helping developers around the world bring their ideas to life. Docker is the favorite developer platform of millions of hobbyist developers and almost 80,000 enterprise customers. This makes an exciting opportunity for continued expansion by combining NanoClaw with Docker Sandboxes.
Cohen expressed his enthusiasm for the collaboration, emphasizing his desire to expand his team and capabilities:
“I want more of them: on R& D, on product, on client management.” – Gavriel Cohen
This ambition speaks to Cohen’s aspirations for NanoClaw and how it aims to change the industry as a whole.
Future Aspirations and Community Engagement
Cohen is planning to continue improving NanoClaw with smart features and increasing community involvement. The insight gained from early users’ feedback has been critical and has defined his path going forward. He recognizes the need for user feedback and intends to integrate it for upcoming releases.
Cohen and Karpathy’s conversation on X continues to generate buzz. This rich dialogue is helping to build an active community of practice around NanoClaw. These conversations have not only better informed the public, but motivated engineers and developers to find safer, more secure replacements within the AI industry.
Cohen learned a lot about product development and UX from this experience, having launched a profitable AI marketing startup with his brother, Lazer Cohen. This experience has informed his view of the industry. While that experiment eventually shuttered to concentrate on NanoClaw, the experience gained still is shaping his long-term strategy.