Question 1

What is quackd?

Accepted Answer

quackd is an open-source command line for all the robots you own. Each robot joins through an adapter — its own SDK, a protocol its host already speaks, or a small daemon quackd puts on the robot — and each one is piloted by an LLM: you state a goal in plain language and the model picks one of that robot’s own skills at a time, until the goal is met or is clearly impossible. A flock of robots can work one task together, each with its own pilot. Eleven cloud vendors work as the pilot, Claude, OpenAI and Gemini among them, and so do local models with no key at all through Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp, LM Studio or any OpenAI-compatible server.

Question 2

Do I need a robot to try quackd?

Accepted Answer

No. Three simulators run on any laptop: a 2D cartoon one; a physics one, where --robot microduck:mujoco runs upstream’s own Microduck model in MuJoCo on the walking policy Pollen trained; and the SO-101 arm’s own, --robot lerobot:mujoco behind quackd[lerobot-sim], which runs the arm’s real backend over the maker’s model of it. Install uv and Python 3.11 or newer, then run: uvx quackd run find-and-kick --provider fake. That uses a scripted pilot, so it needs no API key, and it writes a GIF and a full transcript of every run. There is also a browser demo at www.quackd.org/simulator that installs nothing at all, and on a laptop the keyboard alone can drive the duck there before any model is involved.

Question 3

Which robots does quackd support?

Accepted Answer

Seven adapters ship today: the Microduck, a 25 cm biped from Pollen Robotics; the Open Duck Mini v2, a 42 cm 3D printed biped you can build yourself; an SO-101 class arm through LeRobot; any wheeled base that accepts a Twist over rosbridge; XLeRobot, a dual-arm mobile manipulator on an IKEA cart; AlohaMini, two arms on a motorised lift on a wheeled base; and ToddlerBot, a small open-source humanoid you can build. Each robot declares a manifest, and the model is only ever offered the verbs that manifest declares. Register one by name with quackd robot add NAME, and --robot NAME then works in every command.

Question 4

Can several robots work on one task together?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is experimental. quackd run <duck> --flock NAME gives every member its own LLM pilot, with its own executor, allowlist, budgets and memory, two to eight of them at once; they divide the work with a tell tool that reaches the addressee in its next observation, and each pilot’s prompt carries every peer’s datasheet. The honest part: N simulated members are N separate worlds, with no shared arena and no ground truth to check a claimed success against; a flock costs N budgets and N times the tokens; the tell tool has been exercised by the scripted pilot and by no real model; and no flock has ever run on hardware or across two machines. The bundled demo is uvx quackd run flock-hello --provider fake, a duck and an arm, no key needed.

Question 5

Has quackd run on a real robot?

Accepted Answer

Yes, one of the seven: a LeRobot SO-101 arm. On 2026-09-15 it ran quackd 0.9.0 over lerobot:real, piloted by OpenAI’s gpt-6-astra, and waved, reached and worked its gripper through twelve --goal runs. On 2026-09-23 the same arm, registered by name with a rest pose, took 26 more runs on quackd 0.12.0. The honest half: the arm fell at the end of every run on the first day, which is what the rest pose was written to stop, and on the second the rest pose could not reach a fold that lay past the arm’s calibrated travel. The other six adapters have not met hardware. The Open Duck Mini v2 is the nearest of them to a first run of its own, because quackd ships that robot’s own daemon and the protocol is exercised against it over loopback in CI — so everything except the duck itself is tested. The SO-101 starter guide at www.quackd.org/lerobot walks the path that arm took.

Question 6

Can I control a robot from Claude?

Accepted Answer

Yes. quackd includes an MCP server with nine robot_* tools, so Claude Code or Claude Desktop can drive one robot or a whole flock interactively under the same safety rules as the command line. Add it with: claude mcp add quackd -- uvx quackd serve-mcp --robot microduck:sim2d. Point it at several robots with --robots name=spec,... or at a saved group with --flock NAME.

Question 7

What is a .duck file?

Accepted Answer

A .duck file is a task written as a contract plus instructions, shaped like a SKILL.md. The YAML frontmatter is enforced by quackd — which verbs are allowed, which need a human to confirm, step and time budgets, success criteria and abort rules. The Markdown body is what the model reads. Thirteen of them ship with the package.

Question 8

How does quackd stop the model doing something dangerous?

Accepted Answer

A safety executor outside the prompt enforces the contract: an allowlist, parameter validation, confirmation gates, step and time budgets, abort rules, preconditions and a heartbeat with a kill switch. A verb that is not in the robot’s manifest does not exist, so the model cannot invent one, and stop always means stop rather than going limp.

Question 9

Is quackd free and open source?

Accepted Answer

Yes. quackd is licensed Apache-2.0 and published on PyPI. It has no paid tier and no token requirement, and it never needs $QUACKD to run.

Question 10

What is the $QUACKD token, and does it fund quackd?

Accepted Answer

It is a community token on Solana with no utility. It does not fund development, and it is not issued by or endorsed by the open-source quackd project. It grants no ownership, no revenue, no governance and no claim on the software. Tokens like this are extremely volatile and illiquid, so assume it can go to zero. Nothing on this page is financial advice.

Question 11

Where does the $QUACKD price on this page come from, and where can I trade it?

Accepted Answer

The token trades on PumpSwap and is listed on pump.fun and DexScreener; both are linked from the token section. The price here is fetched live from the public DexScreener API in your browser and refreshes about once a second. It is not stored or snapshotted, so if the feed is unavailable the page shows nothing rather than an old number. Prices move fast and can be wrong the moment you read them — always verify the contract address independently.