Originally published on andrew.ooo — visit the original for any updates, code snippets that aged out, or follow-up posts.

TL;DR

nanobot is an open-source, ultra-lightweight personal AI agent from the HKUDS (HKU Data Intelligence Lab) team. It positions itself in the same family as OpenClaw , Claude Code , and Codex — but with a deliberately small, readable core that you can fit in your head in an afternoon.

Key facts:

41,700+ GitHub stars as of early May 2026, climbing fast on this week's trending list

MIT licensed , Python ≥3.11, packaged on PyPI as nanobot-ai

~4,000 lines of core code — by community accounts, ~90% of an OpenClaw-style core in a fraction of the size

20+ LLM providers : OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek (V4), Kimi (K2.6), Qwen, GLM, MiniMax, Moonshot, Gemini, Mistral, vLLM, Ollama, LM Studio, GitHub Copilot (GPT-5/o-series), OpenRouter, Azure OpenAI, VolcEngine, StepFun, MiMo, Hugging Face

Channel plugins : Telegram, Discord, Slack, Feishu, WeChat, WeCom, DingTalk, QQ, WhatsApp, Matrix, MS…