Getting picoclaw to work on Windows

My friend Shabeer Naha WhatsApped me this link today - https://youtube.com/shorts/HUueAGGKy9I?si=kJ-h7G6Y3sW0ql9h - and asked "Is this true?"

This was my first time I was hearing of picoclaw and I wasn't perturbed. Everyday something in the AI world is coming up and I can no longer keep track of these. I wanted to try openclaw but refrained when I read about agents performing actions automatically on your behalf. And people are reportedly buying multiple Mac Minis for this !?! But what I saw in the video about picoclaw was that it can run even on 10MB of RAM because it doesn't really run the agent on your local device. I mean ... the agent is on your local device but the LLM isn't.

So I decided to give this a shot on my Windows laptop - the expendable laptop.

The docs on the homepage (https://picoclaw.net/#install) says just this :

git clone https://github.com/sipeed/picoclaw.git
cd picoclaw && picoclaw onboard
picoclaw agent
# Or send a single message:
picoclaw agent -m "Hello, introduce yourself"

This is very misleading. Because you can't just cd into a just cloned directory and run a binary esp. if it doesn't exist. The directory in this GitHub has no executable - https://github.com/sipeed/picoclaw

First of all, you need to run this in a Linux environment so I used WSL2 on Windows which was already loaded with Ubuntu 22.04.

git clone https://github.com/sipeed/picoclaw.git

The folder seems to be go project so the project had to be built with the go compiler. Check for your go version - it requires almost the latest version - mine was very much outdated since I don't code in go yet.

go version
go version go1.18.1 linux/amd64

Update go.

sudo apt remove golang-go -y && sudo apt autoremove -y
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/go
wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.25.7.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.25.7.linux-amd64.tar.gz
vi ~/.bashrc

Now add this line to the very bottom of ~/.bashrc

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

Then execute these :

source ~/.bashrc
go version
rm go1.25.7.linux-amd64.tar.gz
make deps
make build
cd build
./picoclaw onboard

You should see something like this on your WSL2 terminal :

anjanesh@ZEROBOOKULTRA:~/picoclaw/build$ ./picoclaw onboard
🦞 picoclaw is ready!

Next steps:
  1. Add your API key to /home/anjanesh/.picoclaw/config.json
     Get one at: https://openrouter.ai/keys
  2. Chat: picoclaw agent -m "Hello!"

I signed up at openrouter.ai and got myself an API key.

vi /home/anjanesh/.picoclaw/config.json

Just edit it to enter the openrouter.ai key

"openrouter": {
  "api_key": "enter-your-openrouter-API-key-here",
  "api_base": ""
}

Also, you need to edit the default provider and model.

  "agents": {
    "defaults": {
      "workspace": "~/.picoclaw/workspace",
      "restrict_to_workspace": true,
      "provider": "openrouter",
      "model": "openai/gpt-5.2",
      "max_tokens": 8192,
      "temperature": 0.7,
      "max_tool_iterations": 20
    }
  },

Now if you enter a prompt like this :

./picoclaw agent -m "What does the company Growthink do ?"

After a whole lot of info lines being printed for about 1-2 minutes, I get the answer as :

2026/02/19 18:00:54 [2026-02-19T12:30:54Z] [INFO] tool: Tool execution completed {tool=web_fetch, duration_ms=435, result_length=93}
2026/02/19 18:01:00 [2026-02-19T12:31:00Z] [INFO] agent: LLM response without tool calls (direct answer) {content_chars=748, agent_id=main, iteration=12}
2026/02/19 18:01:01 [2026-02-19T12:31:01Z] [INFO] agent: Response: Growthink is a business consulting firm (founded in 1999) that helps entrepreneurs and companies grow and raise capit... {agent_id=main, session_key=agent:main:main, iterations=12, final_length=748}

🦞 Growthink is a business consulting firm (founded in 1999) that helps entrepreneurs and companies grow and raise capital. In practice, they provide:

- **Business planning** (business plan writing/consulting and related strategy work)
- **Market research** (industry/market/competitive research to support decisions and fundraising)
- **Investment banking / capital raising support** (helping companies prepare investor materials, refine the investor story/financials, and run parts of the fundraising process)

Sources: Growthink “Services” page (Business Planning, Market Research, Investment Banking) https://www.growthink.com/services and Growthink “About” pages https://www.growthink.com/about-us / https://www.growthink.com/about/.

Why does a CLI still take so much time that doesn't require compute power on your device (and I'm on a 200 Mbps line) is beyond me.

PS: I loaded $10 credits to my openrouter.ai account to try other models. Pricing (https://openrouter.ai/pricing) says 25+ free models and 4 free providers on the free tier.