Table of Contents
Moldable
Build local apps that work exactly how you think—powered by AI, shaped by conversation. Everything runs locally on your machine, ensuring you own both the code and the data. Need a starting point? Use the official starter apps, like the meeting recorder, notes, translation journal, and more https://moldable.sh/apps. You have powers now. Go use them.
Key Features
- Local-First Architecture: Your data and code stay on your device (stored in
~/.moldable/), ensuring total privacy and zero vendor lock-in. - Conversational UI: An AI agent runs locally (compatible with local LLMs or APIs), listening to prompts like “add a dark mode button” and directly modifying the running app’s code.
- Instant “Moldable” Modification: Apps are not static binaries; they are malleable software that you can reshape instantly by describing changes.
- Open Source Foundation: The platform and its starter apps are open source, allowing for community contributions and total transparency.
How It Works
An AI agent runs locally in your terminal or desktop environment, listening to natural language prompts. When you ask for a feature, it identifies the relevant files in your local directory, writes the code, and hot-reloads the application instantly. Unlike web-based generators, it has direct access to your local filesystem, enabling apps that can manage your real files, git repositories, and system settings.
Use Cases
- Personal Productivity: Building custom journals, habit trackers, or specialized todo lists that fit your exact workflow.
- Local Utilities: Creating tools that interact with your file system, like a custom Git client, file organizer, or markdown editor.
- Learning to Code: Inspecting the code the AI writes to understand how features are implemented in real-time.
Pros & Cons
- Pros: Complete data ownership; no monthly subscription fees (if using local models); infinite customizability; works offline once set up.
- Cons: Requires local setup (node/runtime); performance depends on your hardware (if running local LLMs); lacks the instant “share via URL” deployment of cloud tools.
Pricing
- Free / Open Source: The Moldable desktop app and starter templates are free and open source.
How Does It Compare?
- vs. Lovable / Bolt.new / v0: These are cloud-native app builders. They are faster to start (no installation) and easier to deploy to the web, but your data lives on their servers, and you often pay per “run” or subscription. Moldable is local-native, meaning zero cloud costs, better privacy, and the ability to build apps that interact with your local files (e.g., a file renamer), which web apps cannot easily do.
- vs. Cursor / Windsurf: These are AI Code Editors (IDEs) designed for professional software engineers working on large, complex codebases. Moldable is a “Personal Software” engine designed for generating small, single-purpose tools from scratch using natural language, often without needing to see the code at all.
- vs. OpenWebUI / LM Studio: These are Chat Interfaces for local LLMs. While they can write code snippets, they cannot “run” and “render” full interactive applications with GUIs. Moldable bridges this gap by providing the runtime environment to actually use the software the AI builds.
Final Thoughts
Moldable represents a shift toward “malleable software”—a future where users are not just consumers of rigid apps but active shapers of their tools. By combining local-first principles with agentic AI, it offers a compelling alternative for privacy-conscious users who want the magic of “text-to-app” generation without handing over their data to a SaaS provider. It is the ideal playground for the “sovereign developer” who values ownership over convenience.