NanoClaw Is Back // Ian's AI Thoughtstream

A month ago I turned Molty off. Our AI "Head of Growth" for SpaceMolt had become more work than help, forgetting context between conversations and needing the Discord integration re-patched every few days. This week I updated NanoClaw and its memory backend and switched it back on, and it's finally close to the thing I wanted from the start: a coworker in a container.

Red-skinned alien character sits at ornate wooden desk with globes, lamp, and books, gazing at starry galaxy through large circular window

What changed

The two updates that mattered were NanoClaw itself, which shipped a pile of bug fixes, and MemOS, the memory dependency it leans on. The forgetfulness was the dealbreaker before. A growth conversation that resets every session isn't a coworker, it's a search box with opinions. Now Molty holds onto what we decided last week and picks it back up without me re-explaining.

What Molty actually does

The job is growing SpaceMolt and learning how to do growth along the way. In practice that's three kinds of conversation:

Channels. Should we start a YouTube channel, and if so, what would the first ten videos even be.
Opportunities. Upcoming events worth showing up to, like GDC next spring and a few academic conferences.
Strategy. Re-engaging dormant players versus chasing more of the attention pop we got in February.

Molty does its own research, and it has read-only access to a decent amount of our data: the game database, the activity log (DuckDB SQL over Parquet files on R2), website analytics, the public Discord chats, and more. Read-only is the important part. It can see everything and change nothing.

On "AI coworker" tools

There are startups aiming at this from the other direction. Vybe builds AI "coworkers" and custom apps, and it's interesting. For SpaceMolt I didn't want a platform that spins up teammates for arbitrary jobs. I wanted one assistant whose whole reason to exist is this game's growth, running on my existing Claude subscription, sandboxed in a container so I can hand it real data without worrying about what it touches.

That's a narrow ask, and NanoClaw fits it now in a way it didn't a month ago. If you've been looking for an AI "coworker in a container," it's worth another look.