Rui Carmo, who goes by rcarmo on GitHub, published PiClaw this week — a Docker-based sandbox that takes Mario Zechner's Pi Coding Agent and wraps it in a self-hosted web interface. Carmo named it with a nod to OpenClaw, the AI assistant framework that has reportedly grown to around 500,000 lines of code and over 70 dependencies. PiClaw is, in Carmo's own words, his version "with blackjack and bun."

The setup runs pi — the CLI agent from Zechner's pi-mono multi-provider LLM ecosystem — inside a Debian container, paired with a web layer written in TypeScript and Bun. Sessions live in SQLite, covering messages, media files, scheduled tasks, token usage, and an encrypted keychain. Authentication uses WebAuthn passkeys, with TOTP as a fallback.

The interface is more complete than the project's self-deprecating framing suggests. Responses stream token-by-token over SSE, with Markdown, KaTeX, and Mermaid rendering. A CodeMirror 6 editor handles twelve languages, and the workspace includes a file explorer with drag-and-drop uploads and a folder-size starburst visualization. There's also optional WhatsApp integration and a skills system that extends the agent into Playwright automation, web search, charting, and task scheduling.

PiClaw ships as multi-arch Docker images for amd64 and arm64, hosted on GitHub Container Registry, and runs on any OCI-compliant runtime — including Apple Containers, which Apple announced alongside macOS 26.

The project sits alongside a small group of similar lightweight sandboxes. NanoClaw, by qwibitai, takes the same basic approach but uses the Claude Agent SDK rather than pi. Carmo's earlier agentbox preceded both. The main differentiator for PiClaw is pi's multi-provider design: users can point the agent at different LLM backends rather than being tied to one vendor.

The pattern underlying all of these projects — a CLI agent paired with a separate orchestration layer and a pluggable skills system — is showing up more often as developers look for alternatives to larger, more opinionated platforms. PiClaw is a capable example of the form, though how far it spreads beyond technically inclined self-hosters will depend on how much friction the setup involves for everyone else.