core vs picobot
Self-hosted, always-on "personal AI OS": watches your apps, keeps a persistent memory graph, and acts autonomously within guardrails — a product, not a library for building agents. — versus — A self-hosted personal AI agent in a single ~9MB Go binary — persistent memory, 16 tools + MCP, skills, cron/heartbeat, and Telegram/Discord/Slack/WhatsApp channels. Runs on a $5 VPS.
Both are always-on self-hosted personal AI assistants with persistent memory, at opposite ends of the weight spectrum: core is a full 'personal AI OS' product watching your apps; Picobot is a 9MB binary you leave running on a $5 VPS and message from Telegram.
| core | picobot | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 1.9k | 1.3k |
| Forks | 181 | 162 |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| License | NOASSERTION | MIT |
| Last activity | today | 3 months ago |
| Topics | agents, memory | agents |
| Curated connections | 6 | 1 |
core — the curator's take
Reach for CORE when you want an event-driven, self-hosted personal assistant that notices things on its own, remembers across sessions via a memory graph, and acts across your apps with per-action approval gates. NOT the pick if you want a framework to embed agents inside your own software (it's a product/OS, not a toolkit), nor if you need to run a multi-agent team/company with org charts and budgets — that's paperclip's lane.
picobot — the curator's take
The anti-bloat statement piece: zero dependencies, ~10MB RAM idle, instant cold start — an always-on agent with ranked memory recall, background subagents, a natural-language HEARTBEAT.md cron, and self-authored skills ('create a skill for checking weather' → it writes the markdown), reachable from your phone via four chat channels. Runs on a Raspberry Pi or Termux on an old Android. Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including Ollama. Its own README names the target: OpenClaw's power without the 500MB container. NOT a coding harness and single-user by design — this is your personal daemon, not a team platform; complex multi-agent workflows will outgrow it fast, which is rather the point.