PicoClaw
30kA personal AI assistant that runs happily on a ten-dollar board: it lives in Telegram and other messengers, remembers your tasks and reminds you of them, and thinks with a cloud model on your own key. Open source, MIT.
We have not run it ourselves: described from the docs and the repository.
In numbers
What it is
To have an assistant answering in Telegram around the clock, people usually keep a computer switched on or rent a server. PicoClaw, from board maker Sipeed, takes a humbler route: a small Go program that uses a few megabytes of memory and runs on an old Android phone, a Raspberry Pi or a tiny board. The model itself does not run on the board. The assistant passes your question to the provider you chose, while the conversations, memory, reminders and connected tools stay on the board.
What sets it apart from Cline and the other agents in our catalogue is where it works. Those live in your code editor and help while you sit at it. PicoClaw lives in a messenger and works when you are away: on a schedule, on a chat message, through connected MCP servers. It is often described as a rewrite of OpenClaw, but it is not a fork: the project was inspired by NanoBot, the code was written from scratch, and according to the authors almost all of the core was written by an agent under human supervision.
How it works
localhost:18800: add a provider key, connect a channel such as Telegram, start the Gateway and chat.~/.picoclaw/config.json, keys kept separately in .security.yml.SKILL.md are installed with picoclaw skills install.Know before installing
Read the breakdown
We went through this tool in detail — what it does, where the catches are, and who it suits.
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