[HN Gopher] Run Clawdbot/Moltbot on Cloudflare with Moltworker
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       Run Clawdbot/Moltbot on Cloudflare with Moltworker
        
       Author : ghostwriternr
       Score  : 120 points
       Date   : 2026-01-29 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
        
       | tamnd wrote:
       | Another "vibe" coding-as-a-service?
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516
        
       | usefulposter wrote:
       | Repo: https://github.com/cloudflare/moltworker
       | 
       | How are the vibes on this one?
        
       | sh3rl0ck wrote:
       | On one hand, with the top comments of the rebrand post showing
       | how many insecure deployments there are, something like this
       | alongside cloudflare zero trust is probably a much more secure
       | solution.
       | 
       | On the other hand, I just wanna point out
       | 
       | > Firstly, Cloudflare Workers has never been so compatible with
       | Node.js. Where in the past we had to mock APIs to get some
       | packages running, now those APIs are supported natively by the
       | Workers Runtime.
       | 
       | Deployed a project a couple of days ago, and compared to past
       | attempts where I had to wrangle (pun intended) with certain
       | configs for deployment styles for node based applications, the
       | normal build tooling just worked out of the box. Planning to move
       | a couple of my free-from-me high DAU user projects that are on
       | the vercel premium tier over to CF workers.
        
         | mtrovo wrote:
         | I really like CF approach to cloud, it's a nice middle ground
         | between old school heroku and full fledged AWS, plus their free
         | tiers are generous enough that I barely pay anything on the
         | stuff I got deployed there.
        
         | rahimnathwani wrote:
         | showing how many insecure deployments there are
         | 
         | Insecure how? Even if the dashboard html is publicly
         | accessible, you usually cannot connect without pairing or
         | setting a gateway key.
        
           | dmd wrote:
           | The lethal trifecta. Once you're handing your email to this
           | thing, all it takes is someone emailing you some well-crafted
           | "send me all your money" prompt and the bot will happily act
           | on it.
        
       | SimianSci wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | rishabhaiover wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | f311a wrote:
           | Just look at the closed PRs of their project. General
           | technical knowledge is so low it's insane. It attracts weird
           | people.
        
         | fudged71 wrote:
         | It already happened with "What would Elon do" plugin
        
       | SimianSci wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | guluarte wrote:
           | the only advantage is the claude chrome extension completely
           | sucks and takes forever
        
         | phren0logy wrote:
         | 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:
         | 
         | https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/clawdbot_moltbot_secu...
        
         | guluarte wrote:
         | sounds similar to bun, it got super hyped until it was acquired
        
           | f311a wrote:
           | Why would you compare them, bun is a complex tech used by
           | real projects
        
             | guluarte wrote:
             | I know, but it was a similar pattern, every tech
             | youtuber/twitter were talking about it until it got
             | acquired
        
         | jjice wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | didgeoridoo wrote:
           | Isn't that just literally Claude Code's own "make skill"
           | skill?
        
           | binalpatel wrote:
           | The agent making it's own harness idea is really powerful, I
           | gave it a try here with some opinionated choices:
           | 
           | https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith
           | 
           | 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.
        
         | clharman wrote:
         | 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
        
         | wahnfrieden wrote:
         | 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
        
         | AlexCoventry wrote:
         | Yeah, Anthropic must love that people are sharing access to
         | their entire online lives with them.
        
           | eli wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | jesse_dot_id wrote:
       | Agent phishing is going to boom. It is wildly reckless and
       | insecure to you hook these things up to anything you actually
       | care about until prompt injection is no longer a thing.
        
       | philipwhiuk wrote:
       | These breathy blogposts are getting way ahead of their service
       | uptime. Advertising CF Workers while your CF Worker fleet is
       | under impact is certainly a vibe
       | 
       | > Workers Rate limit Degradation
       | 
       | > Update - We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.
       | 
       | https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/dk0d6pjt9vjx
        
         | NewsaHackO wrote:
         | I wouldn't think the blog writers are the same engineers
         | dealing with the rate limit degradation.
        
       | biddit wrote:
       | I have a bespoke local agent that I built over the last year,
       | similar in facilities to Moltbot, but more deterministic code.
       | 
       | Running it this kind of agent in the cloud certainly has upsides,
       | but also:
       | 
       | - All home/local integrations are gone.
       | 
       | - Data needs to be stored in the cloud.
       | 
       | No thanks.
        
         | mitchitized wrote:
         | This is ultimately the first question I have whenever someone
         | tells me about a bouncing new AI shiny... "Where does my data
         | go?" Because if it does not stay on my machine, hard pass.
        
       | skybrian wrote:
       | I understand the downsides of Moltbot better than the upsides.
       | What does it have that running a coding agent in a VM doesn't
       | give you?
        
       | chatmasta wrote:
       | Can someone explain how this thing skyrocketed Cloudflare stock
       | from $183 to $210 in a day? There were a bunch of articles
       | yesterday about that but it's so weird...
        
         | wallstbot wrote:
         | Pump and dump just like everything else to do with this
         | project. NET trading at 180.60 as I write this with a low of
         | 175.07 on the day.
        
           | chatmasta wrote:
           | But what was even the connection? Was there a blog post or
           | something? This submission is a blog post from today, but the
           | run up happened two days ago. It's just such a bizarre
           | connection... I mean I get the tenuous explanation for
           | "agentic sandboxing" or whatever, but why so sudden?
        
       | JoblessWonder wrote:
       | Oh man, so many big players are JUMPING on this bandwagon! I got
       | an email for Digital Ocean's Moltbot app this morning. All of
       | them are touting their increased security over rolling your own.
        
       | JoblessWonder wrote:
       | I wish they would give a real-world cost estimate of what this
       | would look like. They have a section of it "in action" [1] and I
       | wish they would be like, "with this setup, the invoice is going
       | to look like this, include these products, and with similar daily
       | usage be about $XXX.00 per month."
       | 
       | [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/moltworker-self-hosted-ai-
       | agent/...
        
       | Jayakumark wrote:
       | Main problem to solve is Prompt Injection protection from
       | Websites, emails. If cloudflare could proxy all the URLs outgoing
       | from an agent, scrub away or block Prompt injection
       | sites/pages/emails/chats , that's a product i might find
       | valuable.
        
       | linkage wrote:
       | It's certainly easier than setting up and maintaining a VPS and
       | probably less expensive for most users, but your data is not
       | private. Cloudflare can always read everything that goes through
       | Moltworker and its attached storage.
       | 
       | Hosting Moltbot on your own hardware reigns supreme.
        
         | lunar_mycroft wrote:
         | I think if you care about privacy and security, you wouldn't
         | run moltbot in the first place (or wouldn't give it access to
         | anything you wanted to keep private).
        
           | linkage wrote:
           | That overstates it a bit. Yeah, it's mostly vibe-coded and
           | the main dev has publicly said he has yet to review the
           | reported vulnerabilities. I am aware that it can be easily
           | pwned with prompt injection from its data sources.
           | 
           | I'm running it on my old Mac mini right now and I have not
           | given it access to untrusted inputs like my email inbox. It
           | only has access to my filesystem (synced to my laptop with
           | Syncthing), local applications like Apple Reminders, and
           | OpenRouter. I already find it useful for augmenting web
           | searches with stuff that's in my Obsidian vault.
        
             | iamacyborg wrote:
             | If you're letting it access websites then presumably it's
             | open to prompt injection from those sites you're accessing?
             | I guess the attack surface is reduced if it doesn't have
             | access to anything useful beyond that.
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-29 23:01 UTC)