// the find
nearai/ironclaw
IronClaw is an Agent OS focused on privacy, security and extensibility
IronClaw is a Rust-based personal AI agent runtime that runs tools in WASM sandboxes rather than trusting them with host access. It ships multi-channel support (Telegram, Slack, Discord, WeChat, HTTP), persistent memory via PostgreSQL + pgvector hybrid search, and a provider-agnostic LLM layer. It is for developers who want a self-hosted, auditable alternative to cloud AI assistants and are willing to operate their own Postgres.
The WASM sandbox model for tools is the genuinely interesting part — capability-based permissions, endpoint allowlisting, and credential injection at the host boundary mean a misbehaving tool cannot exfiltrate your API keys or hit arbitrary URLs. That is a real security property, not marketing. The hybrid memory search (BM25 + vector with Reciprocal Rank Fusion) is the right call — pure vector search misses exact-match lookups, pure keyword search misses semantic similarity, and most personal-assistant projects pick one and suffer for it. The config model is production-sensible: `api_key_env` stores the variable name, not the secret, and the runtime actively rejects inline secret-shaped values in `config.toml`. The crate structure and test organization are mature — contract tests, boundary tests, and integration tests separated by concern, with a Nextest config.
The 'Reborn' split is the biggest usability problem right now. There are two binaries (`ironclaw` and `ironclaw-reborn`), two state roots, and two configuration systems, and the README tries to document both in one document. A new user cannot easily tell which path is the current one or whether the legacy binary is being phased out. PostgreSQL + pgvector is a significant operational burden for something marketed as a personal assistant — you need a running Postgres instance just to get started, and the lighter libSQL path (`hosted-single-tenant-volume`) is buried as a preview mode with no migration story to production Postgres. Building the WebUI feature requires Node.js and npm, which breaks the 'single Rust binary' pitch. And the default onboarding wizard routes through NEAR AI OAuth, which means your first-run experience is tied to a specific vendor; switching to Anthropic or OpenAI is possible but feels like a workaround rather than a first-class path.