Testing ZeroClaw, Part 2: ZeroClaw is dead?

Earlier this month, I wrote about setting up one of the many lightweight OpenClaw alternatives, namely ZeroClaw. I had some issues with initial setup, but I got to the point where I could talk with my bot over Telegram.

Some of my initial enthusiasm for ZeroClaw was dampened by the divergence between the docs and the features available in the release build. The release build was quite out of date due to the breakneck pace of development. In the week or two following my initial setup, the release build pipeline was broken, so even when they released a new tag, there were no new precompiled binaries available. Being forced to compile the Rust binary yourself kind of goes against the project’s philosophy of ultra-low resource consumption.

They eventually fixed the release pipeline and I started casually working on a system where I could send notes and ideas for blog posts to my bot through Telegram and have it turn them into structured Markdown files.

But two days ago (March 29), I noticed that the ZeroClaw GitHub repo was 404ing. On the same day, the project posted the following on Twitter:

Our GitHub repo is currently returning a 404 for some users. We’re aware and actively investigating. The repo is public and all code is safe.

Will update here as soon as it’s resolved. Thanks for your patience.

There have been no subsequent updates on Twitter or Discord in the two days since, and the GitHub is still unavailable. Needless to say, this is…weird. I’m not sure what’s really going on.

I did some digging, though, and apparently this claimed issue has happened before (at least briefly), according to a Telegram message from March 3 from a former core developer:

Earlier today, during routine maintenance, the visibility of the ‎`zeroclaw-labs/zeroclaw` repository was accidentally changed from public to private and was later restored to public.

This same former core developer dramatically left the project a few days later in another Telegram message posted to the same channel. Since the repo 404 incident, they have also been posting angrily on Twitter about the founder of the ZeroClaw project.

Again, after two days of the repository being unavailable (hidden? deleted?) and with no updates, I’m not sure what to think about the future of the project. For my own personal testing, I might decide to move to another project in the Claw-like ecosystem, or even OpenClaw itself if I think my 4 GB Raspberry Pi can swing it performance-wise.