serious question why anyone on hn would run this?

Both replies to your question give you the two sides. It is a scary, stupid thing to give your house keys to, but it is also very interesting like two trains crashing.

Maybe a middle ground would be isolating it like the article suggests, and poking it with a stick (giving it limited, or newly created accounts) to see what it can do?

Right? It's asking for trouble.

I was in the repebble comments a few days ago and this person rolled their own for very obvious reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47078454

It's fun to explore how we will communicate and work with our new AI colleagues. We discover with play and play is not always safe.

For me at least its an interesting project I can take apart and build on top of. I've built 100% my own agent frameworks from scratch and have learned a lot from them. There is something to be said on learning from others projects as well, also because its an ever evolving project with so many contributes whatever fork you go with of your own, theirs a good chance the new goodies will work with your own modified version. For example I'm looking in to LCM right now, and woo-dent you know it someone ported it to openclaw. But nanobot doesn't have it, so I'm considering working on the LCM port to that. If i succeed i will learn a lot and also contribute to progress in my own little ways.