What Are "Claws"? And Why You Shouldn't Run Them on Your Mac Mini

What Are "Claws"? And Why You Shouldn't Run Them on Your Mac Mini Andrej Karpathy just posted a mini-essay about buying a Mac Mini to tinker with what he calls "Claws" — persistent AI agent systems that sit on top of LLMs. He names OpenClaw, NanoClaw, zeroclaw, ironclaw, picoclaw. Simon Willison calls "Claw" a term of art for the entire category. When Karpathy names something, it sticks. He coined "vibe coding." This is the same energy. Here's his definition: "Just like LLM agents were a new layer on top of LLMs, Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level." I've been building managed infrastructure for exactly this category. Let me break down what Claws are, why running them on a Mac Mini has real tradeoffs, and what the alternative looks like. What Makes a Claw Different from an Agent? Regular LLM agents run, do a thing, and stop. You prompt them, they respond, maybe they call a to