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Show HN: Moltis – AI assistant with memory, tools, and self-extending skills
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.
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.”
A naive question - pi is using jiti to hotreload extensions, but how does hotreloading work at all with Rust?
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Isn't the point of OpenClaw that the agent can modify itself?
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
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?
You should not be limited, which provider do you use?
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...
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.
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.
Very nice.
Though, I am looking forward to the next generation of AI agents that aren't named after a lobster
There is actually a reason, the Rust logo is a crab named Ferris: https://rustacean.net
moltis.org is down fwiw
author here, it works for a few friends. Would love to fix it for you, but you can also just use the github project: https://github.com/moltis-org/moltis