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Show HN: Moltis – AI assistant with memory, tools, and self-extending skills (moltis.org)

131 points by fabienpenso ↗ HN
Hey HN. I'm Fabien, principal engineer, 25 years shipping production systems (Ruby, Swift, now Rust). I built Moltis because I wanted an AI assistant I could run myself, trust end to end, and make extensible in the Rust way using traits and the type system. It shares some ideas with OpenClaw (same memory approach, Pi-inspired self-extension) but is Rust-native from the ground up. The agent can create its own skills at runtime.

Moltis is one Rust binary, 150k lines, ~60MB, web UI included. No Node, no Python, no runtime deps. Multi-provider LLM routing (OpenAI, local GGUF/MLX, Hugging Face), sandboxed execution (Docker/Podman/Apple Containers), hybrid vector + full-text memory, MCP tool servers with auto-restart, and multi-channel (web, Telegram, API) with shared context. MIT licensed. No telemetry phoning home, but full observability built in (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus).

I've included 1-click deploys on DigitalOcean and Fly.io, but since a Docker image is provided you can easily run it on your own servers as well. I've written before about owning your content (https://pen.so/2020/11/07/own-your-content/) and owning your email (https://pen.so/2020/12/10/own-your-email/). Same logic here: if something touches your files, credentials, and daily workflow, you should be able to inspect it, audit it, and fork it if the project changes direction.

It's alpha. I use it daily and I'm shipping because it's useful, not because it's done.

Longer architecture deep-dive: https://pen.so/2026/02/12/moltis-a-personal-ai-assistant-bui...

Happy to discuss the Rust architecture, security model, or local LLM setup. Would love feedback.

32 comments

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vessenes
Cool!

One pain point I have with openclaw is compaction. It uses so many tokens that compaction happens often - but I'd say it's not great at keeping the thread. I think this could be a nice little benefit you offer folks if you can get higher quality continuity.

michelsedgh
I haven’t yet tried openclaw but can someone tell me how is this project different than that? Is this basically a different take on the same thing as openclaw? Dont get me wrong im not against it I just was wondering if theyre basically doing the same thing? If that’s the case I actually appreciate both projects, but idk what theyre doing and how theyre different?
LaurensBER
Very cool! I love the approach, OpenClaw is really cool but there's two major things holding me back for deploying it from friends a family;

- Cybersecurity (you can't expect a non-technical person to read a skill)

- Token usage (without a flat fee subscription it'll become expensive very fast)

I understand that security is a hard problem to solve but having a single binary + containers should definitely help! I'll definitely keep an eye on this.

atmosx
Yeap. Cost is a major problem with these agents. I wonder why MistralAI is never natively supported. It’s the cheapest paid option out there.

ps. One can use mistral’s API through liteLLM.

013
Why can I only see gpt-5.2 and opus-4.5? Is this a limit on Moltis or can my API keys not access the latest models?
gabmartini
Hello! I tried to run with podman but it get stuck in the login of my bot :( Would check it out later on the development.
canadiantim
Very nice.

Though, I am looking forward to the next generation of AI agents that aren't named after a lobster

zimbatm
Isn't the point of OpenClaw that the agent can modify itself?
manmal
A naive question - pi is using jiti to hotreload extensions, but how does hotreloading work at all with Rust?
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theturtletalks
Is there a heartbeat equivalent? It seems a lot of the magic of OpenClaw is the heartbeat functionality that keeps the agent running and being “self-driven.”
w10-1
How can I (anyone) help?

You seem to have a good sense of what you want to do, and a manageable queue of bugs and PR's, but this projects has so many dimensions/large feature surface, you/one could get lost chasing everything or dealing with feedback and help. Any guidance? Just fix bugs we bump into?

twostorytower
Is it compatible with OpenClaw Plugins?
fabienpenso
Yes. The UI allows you to add repositories (OpenClaw is one listed), and you can enable/disable any of them.
P2Chill
Thanks for making this! It's a great application, and in stark contrast with the 'competitors', everything is so polished and it's not full of half baked features. That's a huge plus in my book. More features =/= better if the core isn't solid. I love how right moltis gets this.

I've really been enjoying it. Heavily added onto my fork already. Not at all because it wasn't good already, exactly because it is so it's worth building on top of!

I tried fixing bugs in some alternatives but there were just so many and it felt like a losing battle.

I'll definitely be submitting some (more) PRs in the future. I've pushed one upstream so far for review, but I have a lot more ready to submit later on.

Again, thank you so much for making this! Stellar work!

ck_one
Do you plan on Open Sourcing it? A bit scary to just execute a random binary and put in a bunch of API keys.
CGamesPlay
But what can it actually do? I read the landing page, your blog post, glanced through the docs… lots of stuff about how it’s built and absolutely nothing about how it’s useful to me.

What are some actually useful use cases and how would I install them? This seems like the missing piece.

thisisit
Curious why was this named Molt-is? I understand what the creator of openclaw was trying to do - stretching the "claude" joke by using crab terminology and hence "molt" i.e. to shed the outer exoskeleton to grow. It just sounds like trying to ride on the hype of openclaw/moltbot.
danr4
is this a custom agent loop?
dchuk
Looks like a good architecture. I feel like this needs a complimentary mobile app instead of relying on a chat system like telegram, so you can both plain text interact but also do more advanced stuff like see the backlog of tasks, see the log of completed work, have more robust interactions that include stateful iteration on long form stuff, etc

Very cool build though, will try it out

mongrelion
Hello. I am happy to take this for a spin.

I see that not all models available in my Github subscription are available (all models should be visible).

Further, is it possible to use openrouter with the current implementation? I couldn't figure it out by reading the documentation alone.

Thank you!

eibrahim
the self-extending skills part is really interesting. ive been building AI agents with persistent memory for a while now and the skill/tool extensibility piece is where most frameworks fall short. they either give you a rigid plugin system or completley open-ended function calling with no guardrails.

how are you handling the trust boundary for self-created skills? thats usually where things get tricky.

also curious about the memory architecture. file-based memory (like markdown files the agent reads/writes) has been surprisingly effective in my experience compared to fancy vector DB approaches. simpler to debug, easier for the agent to reason about, and way less infrastructure overhead. whats your approach?

yencabulator
> how are you handling the trust boundary for self-created skills?

At least in the Claude model, there's nothing a skill can do that the model couldn't already do? Isn't it still the same tool calls underneath, with the same permissions?

Think of skills as plugins providing AGENTS.md snippets and a subdirectory of executables, as if those were part of the workspace to begin with.