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

blog.cloudflare.com

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

#61
The prompt injection concerns are valid, but I think there's a more fundamental issue: agents are non-deterministic systems that fail in ways that are hard to predict or debug.

Security is one failure mode. But "agent did something subtly wrong that didn't trigger any errors" is another. And unlike a hacked system where you notice something's off, a flaky agent just... occasionally does the wrong thing. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Figuring out which case you're in requires building the same observability infrastructure you'd use for any unreliable distributed system.

The people running these connected to their email or filesystem aren't just accepting prompt injection risk. They're accepting that their system will randomly succeed or fail at tasks depending on model performance that day, and they may not notice the failures until later.

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

#63

I wish they would give a real-world cost estimate of what this would look like. They have a section of it "in action" [1] and I wish they would be like, "with this setup, the invoice is going to look like this, include these products, and with similar daily usage be about $XXX.00 per month." [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/moltworker-self-hosted-ai-agent/...

One of the devs responded on Twitter: https://x.com/i/status/2016896529416478798

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

#64

Main problem to solve is Prompt Injection protection from Websites, emails. If cloudflare could proxy all the URLs outgoing from an agent, scrub away or block Prompt injection sites/pages/emails/chats , that's a product i might find valuable.

I think that's very difficult. To detect prompts you need to have natural language understand and therefore probably another detection LLM which is itself probably vunerable to prompt injection.

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

#65
"The Internet woke up and started buying Mac Minis"

Cloudflare: Hold my beer, we'll run it in the cloud.

The irony is that the whole point of the "self-hosted" movement was leaving the cloud to own your data and compute. Cloudflare suggests moving it back to the cloud but labeling it Serverless. Technically elegant, but ideologically funny

Though honestly administering Kubernetes at home gets old faster than paying $5 a month

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

#66
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.

There's a hidden trade-off here: Latency vs Privacy

A local agent has zero ping to your smart home and files, but high latency to the outside world (especially with bad upload speeds). A cloud agent (Cloudflare) has a fat pipe to APIs (OpenAI/Anthropic) and the web, but can't see your local printer.

The ideal future architecture is hybrid. A dumb local executor running commands from a smart cloud brain via a secure tunnel (like Cloudflare Tunnel). Running the agent's brain locally is a bottleneck unless you're running Llama 3 locally

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

#69

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?

Easy install, discord/whatsapp/tg out of the box. And some agent orchestration out of the box where the main LLM can farm out tasks to different models/agents - yes Claude code has some of this too but I think this has more
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