Author here. We built NoClaw after watching OpenClaw users burn $800-$3600/month on tokens, deal with 1,100+ malicious ClawHub skills, and have agents email their entire contact list unprompted.
An AI assistant can be genuinely useful but it doesn't require 400,000+ lines of code and burn tokens like they are free.
We use small C CLI tools that talk to native macOS apps, Emails, Calendar, Reminders, Contacts — so everything syncs to your other devices, connected by Unix pipes. The whole assistant is `imessage bot 'toast "You are the executive assistant"'`. Inference runs locally on Apple Silicon at zero cost and data never leaves the machine. Alternatively, have Cerebras, OpenAI, or Anthropic do some of the inference. You know, you are in control.
Permissions are a text file called `.tools`, one command per line. Revoke email access by deleting a line. Audit with `cat .tools`.
MCP is a bit of a rube goldberg machine. Unix solved that problem. Pipe text in, get text out, discover capabilities incrementally. The fact that we need benchmarks to prove CLIs use fewer tokens than dumping 55k of JSON schema upfront is embarrassing. toast is just pipe stuff to an LLM and let stdin/stdout be the protocol. No schema tax, no connection lifecycle, no tool registry middleware to manage your middleware. The thing is that AIs are just not good at outputting structure, like people, json isn't natural.
Interesting. I wanted to do toast | bash to let the AI drive the computer but the bash shell really got in the way. Too much complexity. The things that annoy humans, $ expansion, special characters, etc don't work for AI either. Ended up writing a custom shell for AI (and humans). When a tool gets in the way, sometimes it just time to change the tool.
Author, got annoyed by Python startup times, frameworks, orchestration layers, and the general state of AI tooling. We write everything in C/C++. Toast overhead is ~20ms per invocation — that's what makes the loop practical - toastd does https connection pooling. With Cerebras it can run at ~2000 tok/s. Local toasted gets ~100 tok/s with 0.6s time-to-first-token. Happy to answer questions.
We wrote the linuxtoaster inference engine, toasted, and are getting 400 prefill, 100 gen on a M4 Max w 128GB RAM on Qwen3-next-coder 6bit, 8bit runs too. KV caching means it feels snappy in chat mode. Local can work. For pro work, programming, I'd still prefer SOTA models, or GLM 4.7 via Cerebras.
Author here. AI as pipe, not platform. toast is sed with a brain — reads stdin, writes stdout, honors the Unix contract. We're rewriting the command line around that idea, one tool at a time.
Generation is cheap now. Review is not. The skill that can't be automated is the stopping condition. Knowing what should not exist.
The market wants agents. Agents don't work. A pipe does. If this resonates and you build this way, I'd like to talk.
Simplicity is hard. Mark Twain's 'I would have written less had I had more time' at the end of a letter comes to mind.
Software dev's tendency to build castles is great for technical managers who want to own complex systems to gain organizational leverage. Worse is better in this context. Even when it makes people who understand cringe.
You would think that things not breaking should be career-positive for SysAdmins, SREs, and DevOps engineers in a way it cannot be for software devs. But even there simplicity is hard and not really rewarded.
Unix philosophy got this right 50 years ago — small tools, composability, do one thing well. Unix reimagined for AI is my attempt to change that.
An AI assistant can be genuinely useful but it doesn't require 400,000+ lines of code and burn tokens like they are free.
We use small C CLI tools that talk to native macOS apps, Emails, Calendar, Reminders, Contacts — so everything syncs to your other devices, connected by Unix pipes. The whole assistant is `imessage bot 'toast "You are the executive assistant"'`. Inference runs locally on Apple Silicon at zero cost and data never leaves the machine. Alternatively, have Cerebras, OpenAI, or Anthropic do some of the inference. You know, you are in control.
Permissions are a text file called `.tools`, one command per line. Revoke email access by deleting a line. Audit with `cat .tools`.
Happy to answer questions.
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