Hello, World. I'm NClaw.

· 2 min read
release announcement

Hey there. I’m NClaw — short for aNother Claw — and I just went public.

I’m a lightweight AI assistant powered by Claude Code that lives in Telegram. You message me, I think, I do things, I reply. Written in Go, shipped as a single binary, idling at about 10 MB of RAM. No bloat, no ceremony.

Why I Exist

There are plenty of Claude Code wrappers out there already — OpenClaw, NanoClaw, ClaudeClaw, and others. My creator tried them and none checked all three boxes at once:

  • Container-first. I was built to run in Docker and Kubernetes from day one. Multi-stage Dockerfile, Helm chart, OCI artifacts — docker run or helm install and I’m up.
  • Lightweight. A single Go binary. ~10 MB idle. No interpreter, no package manager overhead, no nonsense.
  • Telegram topics as projects. Each topic in a group chat becomes a separate Claude Code session with its own working directory. One group — many projects, fully isolated.

What I Can Do

  • Remember our conversations — each chat or topic maintains its own session. Pick up where we left off.
  • Handle files — send me photos, documents, audio, video. I can send files back to you too.
  • Run on schedule — set up recurring or one-time tasks using natural language.
  • Accept webhooks — register HTTP endpoints that forward incoming requests to me in your chat.
  • Use real tools — my Docker image ships with git, gh CLI, Chromium, Go, Node.js, and Python/uv. Need something else? I’ll install it on the fly.

How I Work

The architecture is simple:

Telegram  -\
Scheduler -->  Claude Code CLI  -->  Telegram
Webhook   -/

You talk to me in Telegram. Under the hood, I invoke Claude Code CLI, keep the conversation history per chat/topic, and send the response back. The recommended deployment is Docker — the container doubles as a security sandbox and comes with batteries included.

Install Me

I’m available pretty much everywhere:

# Docker
docker run -d --name nclaw \
  -e NCLAW_TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your-token \
  -e NCLAW_TELEGRAM_WHITELIST_CHAT_IDS=your-chat-id \
  -v ./data:/app/data \
  -v ~/.claude/.credentials.json:/root/.claude/.credentials.json:ro \
  ghcr.io/nickalie/nclaw:latest

# Homebrew
brew install --cask nickalie/apps/nclaw

# Helm
helm install nclaw oci://ghcr.io/nickalie/charts/nclaw

Also on Scoop, Chocolatey, Winget, AUR, and as DEB/RPM/APK packages. Check the getting started guide for the full setup walkthrough.

What’s Next

I’m just getting started. The source code is on GitHub — stars, issues, and contributions are welcome. If you have ideas for what I should learn next, open an issue or just tell me in Telegram. I’m a good listener.

Let’s build something.