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Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

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Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#51

Post by indigodaddy »

binalpatel wrote: post #31
jjice wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most interesting part of it to me (that isn't anything particularly special, but I hadn't seen it before) is giving it full file system access so it'll write it's own tools to come back to later. It's an obvious move in hindsight, but I hadn't thought of it. Now, the amount of people running it outside of a sandbox or isolated machine and giving it that kind of access would probably make me cry.

The agent making it's own harness idea is really powerful, I gave it a try here with some opinionated choices: https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith Been running it on a locked down Hetzner server + using Tailscale to interact with it and it's been surprisingly useful even just defaulting to Gemini 3 Flash. It feels like the general shape of things to come - if agents can code then why can't they make their own harn…

Another way to isolate on a server via LXC containers (disclosure my project):

https://GitHub.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#52

Post by indigodaddy »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #34
SimianSci wrote: post #6

There is so much branding and "look at our success" marketing that this project comes off as heavily astro-turfed. Im sure in a month or two we will hear about the new startup the developers are making around this tool. Ultimately its a convenience wrapper that makes it easy to wire up Claude or Chatgpt to a chat platform like discord, but its claiming to be far more revolutionary for reasons I dont yet know.

The actual founder/developer of it already had a 9 figure exit (what he's claimed his personal payout was) and claims to be building these free and open source tools for the fun of it after coming out of retirement

100M eh?

Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#53

Post by indigodaddy »

linkage wrote: post #40

It's certainly easier than setting up and maintaining a VPS and probably less expensive for most users, but your data is not private. Cloudflare can always read everything that goes through Moltworker and its attached storage. Hosting Moltbot on your own hardware reigns supreme.

Ive recently been working on this which could facilitate some isolation on your own VPS:

https://GitHub.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#54

Post by OJFord »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #8
SimianSci wrote: post #6

There is so much branding and "look at our success" marketing that this project comes off as heavily astro-turfed. Im sure in a month or two we will hear about the new startup the developers are making around this tool. Ultimately its a convenience wrapper that makes it easy to wire up Claude or Chatgpt to a chat platform like discord, but its claiming to be far more revolutionary for reasons I dont yet know.

I mean couldn't this literally have been a OpenCode addon or something standalone or even ollama. Like the hype behind it is really ridiculous and I sort of hate it because I feel like its a grift. I saw an AI generated (not even local llm but some cloud llm SORA) AI video ad of lobster/clawdbot on r/localllama not by any reddit ad (whcih gets block by ubo) but rather by a human. I really got pissed by it and there w…

There's so much of it, everything being reinvented as 'X for LLM' when you don't need it, can just use existing X tools perfectly well with LLMs. Even MCP was an example of that.

Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#55

Post by OJFord »

skybrian wrote: post #28

I understand the downsides of Moltbot better than the upsides. What does it have that running a coding agent in a VM doesn't give you?

It's not for that, the hype's not from SWEs, it's the next wave of tech savviness seeing some of what's possible (/riding up that peak before disillusionment trough).

There's nothing new, it's 'just' conveniently packaged for the gamers and /r/battlestation owners and distro-ricing crowd to install and run. There'll be similar hype waves where they too are confused because nothing's new when it's easy enough for our not-technically-inclined older relatives etc. to run somehow (not from GitHub!).

Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#56

Post by Muromec »

jjice wrote: post #21
SimianSci wrote: post #6

There is so much branding and "look at our success" marketing that this project comes off as heavily astro-turfed. Im sure in a month or two we will hear about the new startup the developers are making around this tool. Ultimately its a convenience wrapper that makes it easy to wire up Claude or Chatgpt to a chat platform like discord, but its claiming to be far more revolutionary for reasons I dont yet know.

The most interesting part of it to me (that isn't anything particularly special, but I hadn't seen it before) is giving it full file system access so it'll write it's own tools to come back to later. It's an obvious move in hindsight, but I hadn't thought of it. Now, the amount of people running it outside of a sandbox or isolated machine and giving it that kind of access would probably make me cry.

So much opportunity to build botnets, that I can't even.

Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#57

Post by clharman »

indigodaddy wrote: post #50
clharman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's astroturfed exactly; but the hype is not coming from technical professionals. Like you find a linkedin post with a thousand likes about this or similar projects, and everybody is either #opentowork or ~~Agentic Head of AI Brainstorming at My Bedroom~~ Also clawdbot is objectively a pretty inconvenient way to hook Claude Code up to a chat app. I made a bare-bones one that takes 2 minutes to run with…

So if I have CC running say on a VPS then that's where your thing needs to run too right?

Correct!

Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#58

Post by halfcat »

biddit wrote: post #12

I have a bespoke local agent that I built over the last year, similar in facilities to Moltbot, but more deterministic code. Running it this kind of agent in the cloud certainly has upsides, but also: - All home/local integrations are gone. - Data needs to be stored in the cloud. No thanks.

What kind of hardware do you need, and how is it compared to the cloud agents?

Re: Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis

#60

Post by Der_Einzige »

dabbz wrote: post #23
babelfish wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we gave sand intelligence and you're calling it a grift

We gave it advanced pattern recognition.

But you repeat what the parent said, Why did you say "we gave it intelligence" again?
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