Show HN: Relay – The open-source Claude Cowork for OpenClaw

_pdp_

So this is a wrapper on top of a wrapper on top of Claude Code (which is a wrapper) on top of the API. Considering that Open Claw requires 2GB of RAM and Claude Code is by no means a "lightweight" CLI either, I would argue that the compounding overhead here is hard to justify when you could just hit the API directly. Each layer adds its own memory footprint, failure modes, and debugging surface area and at some point, the convenience of abstraction is outweighed by the cost of running what is essentially a Matryoshka doll of Node processes just to send a prompt and get a completion back. Just a thought.

vanillameow

Genuine question - your README is full of em-dashes, emojis, feature squares and ASCII diagrams - none of which are present in your pre-AI era projects. Why do you expect a potential userbase to care to read something you didn't even care to write? Seems a bit disrespectful to me.

docheinestages

Question to Hacker News admins: Why does AI slop rank so high on the front page nowadays?

ayhanfuat

These seem misleading. Cowork's VM is not on Anthropic servers? > Local file access >> Relay: Truly local >> Cowork: Sandboxed VM on Anthropic's servers > The bottom line: Claude Cowork is excellent for personal productivity on Anthropic's cloud. Relay is for teams and companies that need data sovereignty, compliance-ready audit trails, and model freedom — all on their own infrastructure.

bamazizi

better, more, screenshots or video walkthrough would help why something like this is interesting/needed. The flood of new tools is truly overwhelming there isn't enough time to setup all of them to validate the marketing claims against actual functionality and benefit