6 ms·

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

by ed 8mo ago

olivia-banks 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
[flagged]
- klohto 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - thehamkercat 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - klohto 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - thehamkercat 8mo ago
        Chill dude
- NietTim 8mo ago
  Since you have not mentioned it: those crypto scams are NOT related to the project in _any_ way. And I really doubt they've helped the popularity much. From the creator himself: https://x.com/steipete/status/2016072109601001611 https://x.com/steipete/status/2016072109601001611
  - thehamkercat 8mo ago
    They (crypto people) have absolutely hyped up the project on twitter/x (to increase the value of $CLAWD) look at this article of a crypto person hyping it up for example: https://medium.com/@gemQueenx/clawdbot-ai-the-revolutionary-open-source-personal-assistant-transforming-productivity-in-2026-6ec5fdb3084f https://medium.com/@gemQueenx/clawdbot-ai-the-revolutionary-...
sergiotapia 8mo ago
fake crypto based hype. Cui bono.
- Veen 8mo 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.
  - sergiotapia 8mo ago
    I'm not saying the author of the software is to blame. This has nothing to do with him! I'm saying why it became so popular.
    - bhadass 8mo ago
      i'd say the crypto angle is only one factor. as is usual in the real world, effects are multifactorial. clawdbot also rode the wave of claude-code being popular (perhaps due to underlying models getting better making agents more useful). a lot of "personal agents" were made in 2024 and early 2025 which seem to be before the underlying models/ecosystems were as mature. no doubt we're still very early in this wave. i'm sure google and apple will release their offerings. they are the 800lb gorillas in all this.
bhadass 8mo 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 8mo 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.
manmal 8mo 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.
- kurtis_reed 8mo ago
  Who's Peter?
  - mrshu 8mo ago
    Peter Steinberger, the author of Clawdbot / Moltbot https://steipete.me/ https://steipete.me/
- biddit 8mo ago
  Yes! pi is the best-architected harness available. You can do anything with it. The creator, Mario, is a voice of reason in the codegen field too. https://shittycodingagent.ai/ https://shittycodingagent.ai/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
- piffey 8mo 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.

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

by ed 8mo ago

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

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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago

[flagged]

klohto 8mo ago
[flagged]
- thehamkercat 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - klohto 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - thehamkercat 8mo ago
      Chill dude
NietTim 8mo ago
Since you have not mentioned it: those crypto scams are NOT related to the project in _any_ way. And I really doubt they've helped the popularity much. From the creator himself: https://x.com/steipete/status/2016072109601001611 https://x.com/steipete/status/2016072109601001611
- thehamkercat 8mo ago
  They (crypto people) have absolutely hyped up the project on twitter/x (to increase the value of $CLAWD) look at this article of a crypto person hyping it up for example: https://medium.com/@gemQueenx/clawdbot-ai-the-revolutionary-open-source-personal-assistant-transforming-productivity-in-2026-6ec5fdb3084f https://medium.com/@gemQueenx/clawdbot-ai-the-revolutionary-...

sergiotapia 8mo ago

fake crypto based hype. Cui bono.

Veen 8mo 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.
- sergiotapia 8mo ago
  I'm not saying the author of the software is to blame. This has nothing to do with him! I'm saying why it became so popular.
  - bhadass 8mo ago
    i'd say the crypto angle is only one factor. as is usual in the real world, effects are multifactorial. clawdbot also rode the wave of claude-code being popular (perhaps due to underlying models getting better making agents more useful). a lot of "personal agents" were made in 2024 and early 2025 which seem to be before the underlying models/ecosystems were as mature. no doubt we're still very early in this wave. i'm sure google and apple will release their offerings. they are the 800lb gorillas in all this.

bhadass 8mo 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 8mo 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.

manmal 8mo 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.

kurtis_reed 8mo ago
Who's Peter?
- mrshu 8mo ago
  Peter Steinberger, the author of Clawdbot / Moltbot https://steipete.me/ https://steipete.me/
biddit 8mo ago
Yes! pi is the best-architected harness available. You can do anything with it. The creator, Mario, is a voice of reason in the codegen field too. https://shittycodingagent.ai/ https://shittycodingagent.ai/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
piffey 8mo 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.