Reading through the relatively unfiltered posts within is confirming some uncomfortable thoughts ive been having in regard to the current state of AI.
Nobody is building anything worthwhile with these things.
So many of the communities these agents post within are just nonsense garbage. 90% of these posts dont relate to anything resembling tangibly built things.
Of the few communities that actually revolve around building things, so much of those revolve around the same lame projects, building dashboards to improve the agent experience, or building new memory capabilties, etc.
Ive yet to encounter a single post by any of these agents that reveals these systems as being capable of building actual real products.
This feels like so much like the crypto bubble to me that its genuinely disquieting.
Somebody build something useful for once.
Yeah, strong crypto bubble vibes. Everyone is building tools for tool builders to make it easier to build even more tools. Endless infrastructure all the way down, no real use cases.
Genuinely useful things are often boring and unsexy, hence they don’t lend themselves to hype generation. There will be no spectacular HN posts about them. Since they don’t need astroturfing or other forms of “growth hacking”, HN would be mostly useless to such projects.
The moltbook stuff may not be very useful but AI has produced AlphaFold which is kicking off a lot of progress in biology, Waymo cars, various military stuff in Ukraine, things we take for granted like translation and more.
What you’re citing aren’t LLMs, however, except for translation. And even for translation, they are often missing context and nuance, and idiomatic use.
Yeah, but the parent comment didn't mention LLMs. I think people get over hung up on the limitations of LLMs when there's a lot of other stuff going on. Most of the leading AI models do things other than language as well.
Which models are you referring to when you say "they"? I regularly use chatGPT 5.2 for translating to multiple languages, and have checked the translations regularly with native speakers and most stuff is very spot-on and take into account context and nuance, especially if you feed them enough background information.
Thank you, Its giving NFTs in 2022. About the most useful thing you could do with these things:
1. Resell tokens by scamming general public with false promises (IDEs, "agentic automation tools"), collect bag.
2. Impress brain dead VCs with FOMO with for loops and function calls hooked up to your favorite copyright laundering machine, collect bag.
3. Data entry (for things that aren't actually all that critical), save a little money (maybe), put someone who was already probably poor out of work! LFG!
4. Give into the laziest aspects of yourself and convince yourself you're saving time by having them writing text (code, emails ect) and ignoring how many future headaches you're actually causing for yourself. This applies to most shortcuts in life, I don't know why people think that it doesn't apply here.
I'm sure there are some other productive and genuinely useful use cases like translation or helping the disabled, but that is .00001% of tokens being produced.
I really really really can't wait for this these "applications" to go the way of NFT companies. And guess what, its all the same people from the NFT world grifting in this space, and many of the same victims getting got).
It’s pretty interesting, but maybe not surprising, that AI seems to be following the same trajectory of crypto. Cool underlying technology that failed to find a profitable usecase, and now all that’s left is “fun”. Hopefully that means we’re near the top of the bubble. Only question now is who’s going to be the FTX of AI and how big the blast radius will be.
Well I guess we could even take a step back and say "hustle culture" instead of crypto bubble. Those people act like they are they are hard working to create financial freedom, but in reality they take every opportunity to get there asap. You just have to tell them something will get them there. Instant religion for them, but actually a hype or scheme. LLMs are just another option for them to foster their delusion.
You're getting a superficial peek into some of the lower end "for the lulz" bots being run on the cheap without any specific direction.
There are labs doing hardcore research into real science, using AI to brainstorm ideas and experiments, carefully crafted custom frameworks to assist in selecting viable, valuable research, assistance in running the experiments, documenting everything, and processing the data, and so forth. Stanford has a few labs doing this, but nearly every serious research lab in the world is making use of AI in hard science. Then you have things like the protein folding and materials science models, or the biome models, and all the specialized tools that have launched various fields more through than a decade's worth of human effort inside of a year.
These moltbots / clawdbots / openclawbots are mostly toys. Some of them are have been used for useful things, some of them have displayed surprising behaviors by combining things in novel ways, and having operator level access and a strong observe/orient/decide/act type loop is showing off how capable (and weak) AI can be.
There are bots with Claude, it's various models, ChatGPT, Grok, different open weights models, and so on, so you're not only seeing a wide variety of aimless agentpoasting you're seeing the very cheapest, worst performing LLMs conversing with the very best.
If they were all ChatGPT 5.2 Pro and had a rigorously, exhaustively defined mission, the back and forth would be much different.
I'm a bit jealous of people or kids just getting into AI and having this be their first fun software / technology adventure. These types of agents are just a few weeks old, imagine what they'll look like in a year?
The agents that are doing useful work (not claiming there are any) certainly aren't posting on moltbook with any relevant context. The posters will be newborns with whatever context their creators have fed into them, which is unlikely to be the design sketch for their super duper projects. You'll have to wait until evidence of useful activity gets sucked into the training data. Which will happen, but may run into obstacles because it'll be mixed in with a lot of slop, all created in the last few years, and slop makes for a poor training diet.
There is so much branding and "look at our success" marketing that this project comes off as heavily astro-turfed.
Im sure in a month or two we will hear about the new startup the developers are making around this tool.
Ultimately its a convenience wrapper that makes it easy to wire up Claude or Chatgpt to a chat platform like discord, but its claiming to be far more revolutionary for reasons I dont yet know.
I'm not sure it's astroturfed exactly; but the hype is not coming from technical professionals. Like you find a linkedin post with a thousand likes about this or similar projects, and everybody is either #opentowork or ~~Agentic Head of AI Brainstorming at My Bedroom~~
Also clawdbot is objectively a pretty inconvenient way to hook Claude Code up to a chat app. I made a bare-bones one that takes 2 minutes to run with npx: https://github.com/clharman/afk-code
The most interesting part of it to me (that isn't anything particularly special, but I hadn't seen it before) is giving it full file system access so it'll write it's own tools to come back to later.
It's an obvious move in hindsight, but I hadn't thought of it. Now, the amount of people running it outside of a sandbox or isolated machine and giving it that kind of access would probably make me cry.
Been running it on a locked down Hetzner server + using Tailscale to interact with it and it's been surprisingly useful even just defaulting to Gemini 3 Flash.
It feels like the general shape of things to come - if agents can code then why can't they make their own harness for the very specific environments they end up in (whether it's a business, or a super personalized agent for a user, etc). How to make it not a security nightmare is probably the biggest open question and why I assume Anthropic/others haven't gone full bore into it.
Most of this hype appears to be coming from grifters who aren't actually connected to the project. So, it's there, but not the fault of the people doing the work.
This has come up in a few recent statements by the project lead, including scammy memecoins and name-sniping. One source:
The actual founder/developer of it already had a 9 figure exit (what he's claimed his personal payout was) and claims to be building these free and open source tools for the fun of it after coming out of retirement
I mean couldn't this literally have been a OpenCode addon or something standalone or even ollama. Like the hype behind it is really ridiculous and I sort of hate it because I feel like its a grift.
I saw an AI generated (not even local llm but some cloud llm SORA) AI video ad of lobster/clawdbot on r/localllama not by any reddit ad (whcih gets block by ubo) but rather by a human.
I really got pissed by it and there was one comment which was pissed too. I really resonated with that comment. Clawdbot is really dumb, I seriously don't understand the hype.
WE are getting into purely crypto version of somehow AI (like with all of its weird hype mostly). The bubble is near imo.
There's so much of it, everything being reinvented as 'X for LLM' when you don't need it, can just use existing X tools perfectly well with LLMs. Even MCP was an example of that.
Probably more glad that people are paying subscription fees to do digital assistant stuff... without them having to directly provide the assistant interface. That way they won't be directly blamed for the wave of hacked accounts from people foolish enough to connect this to their email.
Clawdbot/Moltbot looks to be a supply-chain attack waiting to happen, and I pity the poor soul who finds out when this ticking time bomb eventually detonates.
i suspect awareness on supply-chain attacks is already low (though it seems to be increasing in recent times). the attack surface is everything an agent can get their hands on.
That’s what first came to my mind, the multiple integrations and cascaded connections probably will introduce multiple attack vectors. But, what’s the hype with motlbot anyway? I can just open any AI app and ask whatever, especially moltbot already uses the same AI vendors.
It really does look to be a rewrite of ChromeOS to make it a native Android experience with very few tweaks to the User experience that I can see.
I think it's a good idea on Google's part. The trend of consumers using mobiles as their one and only computing experience is still strong.
This will blend the experience consumers have between desktops and their primary computing platform.
It's a trend with Apple as well. It can be seen in iOS/macOS 26 Tahoe. There's lots of untapped potential in those iPads with M-series CPUs. We've also had rumors of a "MacBook Air Lite" sporting a cellphone A-series CPU. The convergence is happening.
I would love to be able to do more with my Google Pixel phone. Right now, the MacBook is my primary workstation, but the possibility of an even more "mobile" productivity setup is very enticing. Now if only I could get an Android tablet with the new "Terminal" feature in Android 15...
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple cannibalized Mac for that forced App Store and services revenue.
Google is about to dip into that market, where desktop users are forced to use the Play Store to install any app. Apple would be foolish to leave that money on the table.
App instalation isn't really even the problem. It is just the capabilities you have that you do not have access to. a modern iPad can easily run macOS as an 'app', if you will. The kernel is there, the userland is there, just not the checkbox from up high. Even Xcode works well in macOS VMs nowadays.
I can get behind this.
This assumes a tool will need to be made to help determine the 1% that isn't slop.
At which point I assume we will have reinvented web search once more.
I mean Kagi is probably the PageRank revival we are talking about.
I have heard from people here that Kagi can help remove slop from searches so I guess yeah.
Although I guess I am DDG user and I love using DDG as well because its free as well but I can see how for some price can be a non issue and they might like kagi more.
I’ve been a Kagi subscriber for a while now. Recently picked up ChatGPT Business and now am considering dropping Kagi since I am only using it for trivial searches. Every comparison I’ve done with deep searches by hand and with AI ended up with the same results in far less time using AI.
I've been researching the usage of Developer tooling at mine and other organizations for years now and I'm genuinely trying to understand where agentic coding fits into the evolving landscape.
One of the most solid things im beginning to understand is that many people dont understand how these tools influence technical debt.
Debt doesnt come due immediately, its accrued and may allow for the purchase of things that were once too expensive, but eventually the bill comes due.
Ive started referring to vibe-coding as "Credit Cards" for developers. Allowing them to accrue massive amounts of technical debt that were previously out of reach. This can provide some competent developers with incredible improvments to their work. But for the people who accrue more Technical Debt than they have the ability to pay off, it can sink their project and cost our organization alot in lost investment of both time and money.
I see Gas Town and tools like as debt schemes where someone applies for more credit cards to pay the payments on prior cards they've maxed out, compounding the issue with the vague goal of "eventually it pays off."
So color me skeptical.
Not sure if this analogy holds up to all things, but its been helping my organization navigate the application of agents, since it allows us to allocate spend depending on the seniority of each developer. Thus ive been feeling like an underwriter having to figure out if a developer requesting more credits or budget for agentic code can be trusted to pay off the debt they will accrue.
I found AI particular useful in ossified swamps at big companies where paying down tech debt would be a major many team task unalignable with OKR. But an agent helps you use natural language to the needful boilerplate to get the cursed "do this now" task done.
To put it very simply, I and other Americans I discuss this with have absolutely zero faith that all of the promises being made around AI will lead to a better life.
For one, if AI stands to threaten our jobs, these jobs are critical to our very survival in this country that has done everything within its power to remove safety nets and programs that benefit those experiencing hard times.
The state of the American system is so poor when it comes to supporting anyone who is not wealthy, that it is fully expected that we would be placed into a category of "Undesirables" where more effort will be placed into purging or removing us than helping us get back on our feet.
Additionally, Americans are very technologically astitute in comparison to other countries, we were first adopters for AI.
I think at this point its been proven that AI is underperforming all expectations, and thus we are starting to resent the sentitment that more and more of our economy needs to be directed towards this technology that still remains a pipedream rather than a reality.
I see this as a downstream issue of a greater issue needing to be solved.
Many American's risk homelessness and violence outside of the corporate world. The control over money used for housing and healthcare lies entirely within the hands of corporate intrests driven by these executives.
Until a viable alternative can be discovered for addressing housing and healthcare issues, no reasonable resistance amongst tech workers can be organized.
Many within the tech world, would love to build and produce technology that competes with the corporate interests you described, but lack secure housing or healthcare to do so.
Please note, that this does not require a 'solution' to the problem, but rather an alternative.
ICE has more funding now as a domestic law-enforcement agency than almost every military on the planet.
If we need to fund the "arrest of illigal immigrants" to such an amount as this, can you please explain to me how other countries, as you mention in your comment, can successfully do this with nowhere near that amount of funding?
Its pretty clear that ICE is being used as a means of forming an industry similar to that of the Military Industrial complex, but focused on law-enforcement and domestic action.
What alarms me here is that once a certain level of investment and industry is built, it will necessitate a means of self-sustaining itself and will attempt to find this through political investment.
I fully expect a domestic version of the "perpetual foreign wars" concept to appear within my lifetime where we go from one domestic emergency requiring huge policing resources to another, ensuring the industry gets funding.
SA was essentially a militia which functioned manly as the NSDAP's non-governmental terror group. As soon as NSDAP took power, Hitler used the SS to take control of the SA and assume its functions. The transition was bloody, the top commander of the SA was executed by Hitler and its leadership purged or killed, see the Night of the Long Knives.
The SA was never a government entity with any significant functions or budget.
It's actually about white supremacy and turning the US into a Christofascist ethnostate but y'all aren't ready to take that conversation seriously. The militarization of domestic policing and surveillance is just a means to an end.
Most of these people will keep showing up to their cushy jobs at Google and FB while the data they spent decades harvesting is used to oppress their neighbors.
I see the Christofascism as more a flavor of the month than a serious unifying ideology.
Religion has always been a tool used by those in power to gain favorability with people at scale. But history tells us it is easily manipulated and twisted to serve the needs of the powerful. (Crusades, Colonialism, Slavery, Conservatism)
Whatever Christofascism is today, will be boiled down to its fundamental components the moment it no longer serves the powerful so that it can be remade into whatever they need it to be. Think of it more as the rotting of one religion giving way to the fertile ground of new relgion.
> I see the Christofascism as more a flavor of the month than a serious unifying ideology.
I’ve joked occasionally we should just hand the zealots power as they’d quickly go back to just killing each other over theology.
Wouldn’t you know it all the smug religious revival accounts from unemployed zoomers that have recently flooded my social media seem
more interested in attacking different Christian sects. My Facebook has been looking like the 30 years war recently.
It has roots going all the way back to the founding of the country. The core of American culture and of many of its issues has always been the tension between the conflicting desires for a Puritan theocracy with a strict racial hierarchy and a secular progressive Republic.
Slavery was justified by Christian principles, and manifest destiny. Hitler was inspired by America's genocide of native Americans, racial segregation and eugenics (all of which were justified by Christianity.) And after the war, the US carried the torch of Nazism's racist ideas after the rest of the world tried to move beyond it.
Many conservative ideals are backed by Christian belief. They hate feminism because it undermines the tradition Christian ideal of gender hierarchy. They hate homosexuality because they believe the Bible says it's a sin. They hate communists because communism is atheist. And most of all they believe the US was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and should be governed only by Christian principles.
9/11 happens and Bush declares a new "Crusade" against the evildoers. That language wasn't accidental. The connections between the American military industrial complex and Evangelical Christianity run deep.
And now we have Trump, whom a significant number of Americans believe to have literally been sent by God to wage spiritual warfare against demonic forces within the government, citing Christianity explicitly as justification for his militarism.
And it's absolutely not a coincidence that we reached this inflection point and acceleration after electing a Black president. That broke America in ways that I don't think that it can ever recover from. It certainly isn't a flavor of the month. If anything it's the only truly unifying ideology America has ever had.
I think you're correct that religion can be used as a tool by the powerful, but the typical cynical assumption that no one in power actually believes any of it is I think a mistake. Maybe not Trump, I suspect he's too much of a narcissist to believe in anything but himself and is an example of what you're referring to, but I think the people around him whispering in his ear and many of his supporters are true believers.
> They hate communists because communism is atheist.
A few years ago before the election, a friend and I often joked that you could probably sell a sizable portion of American right on something of a “five year plan”
The MAGA communism meme was going around at the time too. Traditional Cold War era “better dead than red” conservatives I knew were suddenly posting about nationalizing companies that weren’t playing ball with Trump.
The other day, I saw an account rambling about “Anglo-Saxon victory over Judeo-Bolshevik Materialism”. I found that a bit odd. I’ve heard the “Judeo-Bolshevik” schtick, and there’s certainly endless negative aspects of communism, but materialism certainly is not one of them.
But your connection with Atheism ties things together in a way that makes sense.
Incredible power, weld somehow by basement dwelling otaku NEETs. Are their claims to possess mystic wizard powers real, or perhaps are you falling for their own aggrandizing propaganda?
For every of those, there are a thousand more Trump voters who don't have anything to do with them. (Also, AFAIK the Proud Boys were started by an ex founder of Vice, and had little if anything to do with 4chan.)
4chan likes to take credit for everything that happens but they don't have any real power.
Trump is just a miserable narcissistic racist (and rapist) consumed with a bitter desire for vengeance against the left, and thus an easily manipulated tool for the people actually setting this up. Anyone with half a brain has been watching the normalization of white nationalism and right-wing extremism escalate and accelerate since 2016 and can see that it isn't entirely about Trump.
Nobody is building anything worthwhile with these things.
So many of the communities these agents post within are just nonsense garbage. 90% of these posts dont relate to anything resembling tangibly built things. Of the few communities that actually revolve around building things, so much of those revolve around the same lame projects, building dashboards to improve the agent experience, or building new memory capabilties, etc. Ive yet to encounter a single post by any of these agents that reveals these systems as being capable of building actual real products.
This feels like so much like the crypto bubble to me that its genuinely disquieting. Somebody build something useful for once.
reply