If you're like me....

When I was first introduced to OpenClaw, I was enamoured. What a concept - a real LLM AGENT, but democratised. No specific vendor-lock in. No demands for a subscription. What an amazing idea.

Then I installed OpenClaw for the first time, and I was taken aback by how dangerous it felt. I'm under no illusion that an LLM has hostile intent, but it was truly unchained.

I installed it anyway, but in a sandbox where it couldn't do any damage - and I restricted what it had access to. And then I played with it. I'm calling it play because I had a lot of fun. I tried different configurations. Different models. Different chat providers. Different ideas. I was genuinely inspired. OpenClaw was the first application I encountered which treated the model as a component and the agent as the scaffolding around it. I am months into my journey and I am learning new things every day. But I wanted something fit for my professional life - something I could introduce in my company to drive a genuinely useful AI adoption strategy. OpenClaw was just too risky for me for that. Governance was tricky, observability was immature, boundaries were porous, and for all of the flexibility that it provided, I found it too rigid in the places where I wanted to make changes.

So I started to search for something which fit my requirements. I wanted something which didn't lock me into a vendor for any particular thing, and I wanted something which I could deploy safely in a corporate environment. A few contenders came up in my research and I played around with them too, but I just couldn't find anything that fit what I was looking for.

So I gave up on searching and built my vision instead. Now that I'm done building and documenting, I wanted to share it with others who, like me, understand that “just prompt it better” isn't architecture and asking an LLM politely not to hallucinate isn't a quality gate.

So here it is - a TypeScript Agent Development Kit (or just ADK for short):

@nhtio/adk

Docs: https://adk.nht.io
GitHub mirror / issues: https://github.com/NHTIO/ADK

It is early. There will be hiccups. The GitHub repo is a public mirror because this is a company-maintained internal tool, but issues are welcome - especially ones that find flaws, mistakes, or broken assumptions.

For those of you who want something cool to read but aren't going to use it, I recommend reading the showcase where I force a tiny model without the ability to call tools and I turn it into an in-browser documentation agent: https://adk.nht.io/showcase/ask-adk.html

Otherwise, feedback is welcome and desired, and I hope this helps someone else out there.