Nanobot

Today I noticed that new version of Qwen was realesed . Only 35B-A3B for now but this is the same size of Qwen I was using previously. Usually (as with every other software) it is better to wait few weeks for fixes, in this case for re uploads of the model, that is done after testing/template adjustments, but it is not a problem to do few tests. I decided to give it a spin. I added it to my llama swap instance and started it up.

I am blogging last few weeks about my new aventure with nanobot. I am running model for that little assistant of mine on Desktop Framework motherboard I bought couple of days ago.

Few days ago I was working on my own fork of nanobot. I was not happy how few things are not entirely correctly implemented in this project. For example command support in Matrix channel. I created PR for that one here . Unfortunately it was not merged yet. I am not sure why. Maybe it is mising few unit tests.

Few days ago I thought my assistant to do web search via Browsh and Duck Duck Go. It was working for some time with small problems, like for example I changed host name of the machine hosting nanobot and forget to adjust the host name in skill URL. Another small pain point is that sometimes returns timeout instead of web page content and not falls back to Brave Search API, and since I do not like that service, there is no API key and it falls back to DDG via python code. So it is mostly slow but I am still happy with that.

Recently I started playing with Nanobot which is a bit like OpenClaw but, in my opinion much better since it is small and simple and have native integration with custom OpenAI APIs providers. I decided to use vLLM because I wanted to use Qwen 3.5 because according to my quick reaserach it is pretty good in such agentic usage and Qwen models are built with integration with SgLang and vLLM frameworks in mind. Also AMD is testing their own drivers and libraries, ROCm on docker images with SgLang and vLLM and Desktop Framework is AMD APU. So all of it since like a good idea since I decided to go with Strix Halo unifies memory architecture for my AI assistant. I bought Desktop Framework motherboard and played with it a little to test models performance on ROCm inside the docker. It was not blazing fast but enough to actually have working solution.

I bough lately Desktop Framework with intention of running Qwen 3.5 as model for my AI assistant on Nanobot . At first I could not run this model on this hardware for some weird bug in one of the libraries. I explained why and how I fixed it here . In this post I will just put the list of packages that I used to run Qwen finally and vLLM command switches and parameters.

Recently I started playing with nanobot . It is pretty cool tool. I was able to connect it to my own instance of vLLM running Qwen 3. I must say that so far it is great experience. Though it was sometimes annoying.

What was itching me from the start was abuse of emojis by the bot. I am using emojis from time to time myself, but what was produced by LLM was just excessive. Almost every message was finished by:

Main problem with running your own AI assistant is speed. Nanobot is lightweight but main problem it time od the reponses generated by the model. I am running right now Qwen 3 27B parameters. Average reponse varies but it is at least few seconds. If I would have faster GPU than Radeon 7900 XTX than probably it would faster but prices of GPUs are crazy now.

One of the things I have been testing my little chatbot with was searching for stuff on the internet. For example I like to check prices of some PC parts from time to time. Just out of curiosity and to have a knowledge how crazy it is (NVMe SSDs of 8TB sizes are at least 2x times pricier than last year, on the other hand salary for my profession dropped to 60-70% last 3 years, without inflation, with inflation it would be around 58%). Things are crazy.

I started digging into Nanobot code to check why it cannot connect to Matrix server despite the config being correct and nanobot gateway being executed. Just in case I messed up something I did recreate entire nanobot workspace by doing nanobot onboard after removing entire directory. Did not work.

Closer inspection of the code shed some light on the problem: the config was not being used because channel was never instantiated. That part of the code was gone for some reason despite the Readme stating it is possible to integrate nanobot with Matrix.

I recently started experimenting with my own AI asisstant. I decided to skip on OpenClaw for being massive slop of 400k LOC of vibe coded monstrosity. Looking trough web I found that there is also NanoClaw which seems much better but looks like it is tied to Anthropic service and I like owning my own data and I self host what I can.

That left me with Nanobot being my only option from bigger open source projects that are (relatively) known, are under active development and have big user base.