Show HN: Moltis – AI assistant with memory, tools, and self-extending skills

Posted by fabienpenso 1 day ago

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

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.

52 points | 19 comments

manmal 30 minutes ago|

A naive question - pi is using jiti to hotreload extensions, but how does hotreloading work at all with Rust?

michelsedgh 2 hours ago||

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?

fabienpenso 2 hours ago|

author here.

It's a different take and heavily inspired at first by OpenClaw, which is a great product and Peter the founder is an amazing human being. I'm adding features than I want, since I do Moltis for my own use but also try to add features than others will enjoy.

I think Rust makes a lot of sense security wise, it does add benefits like being a single binary and very easy to install. I also tried to make it easy to try with a 1-click deploy on the cloud.

I'm not sure this is convincing enough but I think you can only judge by yourself trying it out, and I'd love feedback.

afro88 28 minutes ago|||

Aside from security and efficiency, is there anything openclaw and do that moltis can't? Like for example, does moltis have the "heartbeat" thing, short and long term memory, can update a soul.md etc?

I'm so keen to try openclaw in a locked down environment but the onboarding docs are a mess and I can see references to the old name in markdowns and stuff like that. Seems like a lot of work just to get up and running.

michelsedgh 1 hour ago|||

Thanks for the explanation! I love different takes, so good luck! I will try it later on. As I said i haven’t tried openclaw but just a quick look it seems like your take has all the pain points of openclaw fixed! Thanks Fabien

vessenes 2 hours ago||

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.

LaurensBER 2 hours ago||

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.

zimbatm 1 hour ago||

Isn't the point of OpenClaw that the agent can modify itself?

wortelefant 20 minutes ago|

If you run it with a cheaper model or just once in a while, it will write sometjing unexpected into its config json, restart and crash. Happens every few days. I learned to back up the config the hard way

gabmartini 1 hour ago||

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.

013 1 hour ago||

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?

fabienpenso 1 hour ago|

You should not be limited, which provider do you use?

013 1 hour ago||

For the models? Directly from Anthropic and OpenAI. I'm running moltis via the docker container

edit: There is a gpt-5.3 model, but selecting that gives me the error:

Error The model `gpt-5.3` does not exist or you do not have access to it. Provider: openai

I don't see a 5.3-codex, and no opus 4.6...

fabienpenso 1 hour ago|||

Let me confirm, I just tried on digitalocean and I have a similar issue, the last version I published might have issue. Fixing as of now.

fabienpenso 1 hour ago|||

oh so those are issues from the provider itself, you get to choose between model the provider advertise for you, meaning:

- you can have models you can not actually use (that gpt-5.3 response) - you can have model non-listed.

Those are all coming from the provider with your API_KEY.

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