Comment by ed

3 days ago

A bit OT but why is moltbot so much more popular than the many personal agents that have been around for a while?

39 comments

ed

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manmal  3 days ago

- Peter has spent the last year building up a large assortment of CLIs to integrate with. He‘s also a VERY good iOS and macOS engineer so he single handedly gave clawd capabilities like controlling macOS and writing iMessages.

- Leaning heavily on the SOUL.md makes the agents way funnier to interact with. Early clawdbot had me laugh to tears a couple times, with its self-deprecating humor and threatening to play Nickelback on Peter‘s sound system.

- Molt is using pi under the hood, which is superior to using CC SDK

- Peter’s ability to multitask surpasses anything I‘ve ever seen (I know him personally), and he’s also super well connected.

Check out pi BTW, it’s my daily driver and is now capable to write its own extensions. I wrote a git branch stack visualizer _for_ pi, _in_ pi in like 5 minutes. It’s uncanny.

  • piffey  3 days ago

    I've been really curious about pi and have been following it but haven't seen a reason to switch yet outside anecdotes. What makes it a better daily driver out of the box compared to Claude or Codex? What did you end up needing to add to get your workflow to be "now capable to write its own extensions"? Just trying to see what the benefit would be if I hop into a new tool.

    • manmal  2 days ago

      Why don’t you try it, it’s 2 minutes to setup (or tell Claude to do it), and it uses your CC Max sub if you want.

      Some advantages:

      - Faster because it does no extra Haiku inference for every prompt (Anthropic does this for safety it seems)

      - Extensions & skills can be hot reloaded. Pi is aware of its own docs so you just tell it „build an extension that does this and that“. Things like sub agents or chains of sub agents are easily doable. You could probably make a Ralph workflow extension in a few minutes if you think that’s a good idea.

      - Tree based history rewind (no code rewind but you could make an extension for that easily)

      - Readable session format (jsonl) - you can actually DO things with your session files like analysis or submit it along with a PR. People have workflows around this already. Armin Ronacher liked asking pi about other user’s sessions to judge quality.

      - No flicker because Mario knows his TUI stuff. He sometimes tells the CC engs on X how they could fix their flicker but they don’t seem to listen. The TUI is published separately as well (pi-tui) and I‘ve been implementing a tailing log reader based on it - works well.

      7 replies →

  • chrisjj  2 days ago

    > He‘s also a VERY good iOS and macOS engineer so he single handedly gave clawd capabilities like controlling macOS

    Surely a very good engineer would not be so foolish.

  • saberience  3 days ago

    It’s vibe coded slop that could be made by anyone with Claude Code and a spare weekend.

    It didn’t require any skill, it’s all written by Claude. I’m not sure why you’re trying to hype up this guy, if he didn’t have Claude he couldn’t have made this, just like non engineers all over the world are coding all a variety of shit right now.

    • biddit  3 days ago

      I’ve been following Peter and his projects 7-8 months now and you fundamentally mischaracterize him.

      Peter was a successful developer prior to this and an incredibly nice guy to boot, so I feel the need to defend him from anonymous hate like this.

      What is particularly impressive about Peter is his throughput of publishing *usable utility software*. Over the last year he’s released a couple dozen projects, many of which have seen moderate adoption.

      I don’t use the bot, but I do use several of his tools and have also contributed to them.

      There is a place in this world for both serious, well-crafted software as well as lower-stakes slop. You don’t have to love the slop, but you would do well to understand that there are people optimizing these pipelines and they will continue to get better.

    • manmal  2 days ago

      Weekend - certainly not, the scope is massive. All those CLIs - gmail, whisper, elevenlabs, whatsapp/telegram/discord/etc, obsidian, generic skills marketplace etc, it's just so many separate APIs to build against.

      But Peter just said in his TBPN interview that you can likely re-build all that in 1 month. Maybe you'd need to work 14h per day like he does, and running 10 codex sessions in parallel, using 4-6 OpenAI Pro subs.

bhadass  3 days ago

hard to do "credit assignment", i think network effects go brrrrrr. karpathy tweeted about it, david sacks picked it up, macstories wrote it up. suddenly ppl were posting screenshots of their macmini setups on x and ppl got major FOMO watching their feeds. also peter steinberger tweets a lot and is prolific otherwise in terms posting about agentic coding (since he does it a lot)

its basically claude with hands, and self-hosting/open source are both a combo a lot of techies like. it also has a ton of integrations.

will it be important in 6 months? i dunno. i tried it briefly, but it burns tokens like a mofo so I turned it off. im also worried about security implications.

  • ed  3 days ago

    It's totally possible Peter was the right person to build this project – he's certainly connected enough.

    My best guess is that it feels more like a Companion than a personal agent. This seems supported by the fact I've seen people refer to their agents by first name, in contexts where it's kind of weird to do.

    But now that the flywheel is spinning, it can clearly do a lot more than just chat over Discord.

olivia-banks  3 days ago

The only context I've heard about it has been when the Mac Mini clusters associated with it were brought up. Perhaps it's the imagery of that.

  • elemdos  3 days ago

    Yeah makes sense. Something about giving an agent its own physical computer and being able to text it instructions like a personal assistant just clicks more than “run an agent in a sandbox”.

  • xnx  3 days ago

    Yes. People are really hung up on personifying or embodying agents: Rabbit M1, etc.

    The hype is incandescent right now but Clawdbot/Moltbot will be largely forgotten in 2 months.

thehamkercat  3 days ago

[flagged]

sergiotapia  3 days ago

fake crypto based hype. Cui bono.

  • Veen  3 days ago

    It's not. The guy behind Moltbot dislikes crypto bros as much as you seem to. He's repeatedly publicly refused to take fees for the coin some unconnected scumbags made to ride the hype wave, and now they're attacking him for that and because he had to change the name. The Discord and Peter's X are swamped by crypto scumbags insulting him and begging him to give his blessing to the coin. Perhaps you should do a bit of research before mouthing off.