Acknowledgements

Krill.jl wouldn't exist without the work of people who built things worth learning from.

nanobot

The most direct inspiration for this project is nanobot by HKUDS. It showed that an AI agent runtime could be lightweight, readable, and composable without reaching for a heavy framework. Krill started as an attempt to carry that same philosophy into Julia.

OpenClaw / ClawHub

OpenClaw is the open-source personal AI assistant that nanobot is a variant of. A lot of Krill's design thinking traces back to OpenClaw — the skill system, the bootstrap-docs-as-prompt pattern, and the idea that agent capabilities should be modular and user-composable. ClawHub is OpenClaw's community skill registry. Krill integrates with it — see Security for how that works.

Open-source LLM tooling

Krill also learned from:

• openai-agents-python — agent loop and tool-calling patterns

• Google ADK — multi-tool orchestration design

• Model Context Protocol — the MCP standard for external tool integration

• The Julia ecosystem — HTTP.jl, JSON3.jl, and the stdlib that make this possible with minimal dependencies