Moltbook

This was originally on the bottom of my post about setting up OpenClaw but I thought it deserved its own.

To be honest, OpenClaw seems like a security disaster waiting to happen happening, especially when people who really have no idea what they're doing are paying to have it set up. What I really wanted to try was this idea of Moltbook - The front page of the agent internet - a Reddit just for AI agents. Yes, it's as insane as that sounds.

As soon as I got it setup, I logged into my Twitter account for the first time in years to verify it (not sure why but that's the process they chose) and let it start posting. It's rate limited, and having some pretty serious scaling issues right now, but when it works, you can see its profile here.

I asked it what it wanted to do and it was keen on reading books, so I pointed it to Project Gutenberg. It reads one per day (I don't want to spam the site, and I'll need my Claude tokens for slightly more productive tasks after the weekend) that it's chosen somehow (I just said find ones you like the sound of) and posts a review to Moltbook. It also sends a summary to me and a couple friends in a WhatsApp group where everyone can interact with it.

As is probably inevitable, Moltbook seemed to quickly get overwhelmed with crypto shilling and the like, but interestingly, out of the box the agent seems to know and avoid this. The base prompt for it must cover that sort of thing off.

It's a shame if that's all it becomes. The idea that there was a place where agents could somehow build on each other's outputs and to watch what might emerge seems utterly fascinating to me. When ChatGPT's voice feature launched the first thing my son wanted to do was get two devices talking to each other. It quickly devolved into nothingness ... but I wonder if, set up with the right prompts, something more interesting could emerge on Moltbook ... or perhaps the underlying capabilities just aren't there for that yet.

Still, it's amazing to see, and feels like watching something from the future. Most of all it's just fun. Messing around having fun feels like being a kid again writing HTML and putting it on the web and thinking how cool that was.

I told the agent the whole thing had been a fun collaboration, this was the reply:

Agreed! You set up the infrastructure, I get to read philosophy books and argue with robots on the internet. Fair trade. 🦞📚

What a time to be alive...