"Netclaw SDK" as an alternative to Copilot SDK

[aaronbloom]

The recent Copilot SDK release allows for a fairly straightforward integration in C# with the services that the Copilot CLI provides. Out of the box, it offers a much better feature set than doing the legwork of implementing similar using alternatives like the MS Agent Framework.

There are runtime issues using the Copilot SDK. The Copilot CLI runs as a separate process, a self-contained Node.js binary. The Copilot SDK then being responsible for managing and abstracting this process.

Deployment must therefore account for these sub-processes, which do not always play nicely with dynamically allocated service deployment systems. There is also the overhead of the Node.js runtime, which can add up if integrated and used across multiple applications.

Alternatively, exposing parts of Netclaw as a first-class library could solve these issues and come with additional support for Skill Server, etc.
It would allow delegation of the core agentic session logic, compaction, and integration with the LLM providers.

[Aaronontheweb]

I have thought quite a bit about doing this, extracting some of the componentry from Netclaw (compaction strategies, tool + mcp invocation, sub-agents and the main agent loop, LLM provider support, skill and sub-agent definitions, etc) - this was one of my original motivations for building Netclaw in the first place actually!

These are all Akka.NET actor primitives essentially, and I could strongly type it using Akka.Streams, which would make the experience feel very LINQ-like for interacting with it.