pi-durable-bot (Pots)

The open-source Grok Bot alternative: an AI coworker that acts on its own.

It reads every channel, email and event you give it, decides what matters, does the work on its own computer, and speaks up when it should.

Demo · Compare · Quick start · How it decides · How it works

⭐ If Pots is useful to you, a star helps other people find it.

[!TIP] Setting this up with an AI agent, such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor? Have it read docs/for-agents.md first. That page explains Pots to your agent and how to set it up. In short: the agent installs it and makes the bot, you sign in to your model with pots login, and then the bot connects Slack and your other apps itself.

Grok Bot, dots and Claude Tag showed what an AI teammate can be. pi-durable-bot gives you the same kind of coworker as open source: it runs on your machine, with the model you choose, in the places your team already talks.

Open and yours

Grok Bot, OpenAI dots, Claude Duet, Claude Tag and Meta Muse are closed products. They run on someone else's computer, with someone else's model, inside the apps they chose. pi-durable-bot is MIT-licensed and runs where you put it.

The other products as their makers described them in public, November 2026; they may have changed since. Grok Bot, dots, Claude Duet, Claude Tag and Muse are products of xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. pi-durable-bot is not affiliated with any of them.

Any model. Log in once with a subscription you already pay for, use an API key from any of the 40+ providers pi supports, point it at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (vLLM, SGLang, a proxy), or run a local model with Ollama, LM Studio or llama.cpp. The bot uses pi's own model layer, so every model pi can use, the bot can use. With a local model for the agent and the judge, nothing leaves your machine. You are not locked to one model vendor.

Any channel. The core speaks in five plain words: channel, place, thread, message, person. Platform details stay inside one adapter per platform. Slack, Discord and Telegram work today; Teams or email is one more adapter, not a rewrite. One bot can be in many channels and stays the same person everywhere.

Your business. Give it your own tools, data and workflows. It can run several bots on one machine, each with its own name, persona, responsibilities and memory. A bot can even edit its own definition, or create a new bot.

Not a bot. A coworker.

Most AI bots are a command line with a chat bubble. You @ them, they answer, they forget. A real coworker works differently:

What it does

📥 Its own inbox

Every message in every place you invite it to lands in one inbox: channel messages that never mention it, edits, deletions, reactions, people joining, and its own messages. It keeps all of it in a local SQLite log and reads that log with SQL whenever it needs context. Nothing is thrown away when a conversation gets long.

🧠 Its own judgment

It is woken in three ways, the same three ways a person notices work:

Being woken is not the same as speaking. Each time, the agent reads the log and decides if it should say anything, where, and when. Most of the time the right answer is to stay quiet.

💻 Its own computer

It has a real machine with a shell, files, the internet, and a screen it uses like a person: the browser and the apps on it, with the mouse and keyboard. It does not wait for a plugin. It writes the script it needs, runs it, fixes it, and keeps the useful ones. That covers research, spreadsheets, reports, monitoring a web page, filling a form, or booking a flight, and also code.

This is code mode: the agent gets a few general tools (read, write, edit, bash, screen) plus three channel actions (send, react, call), and builds the rest itself. One more tool, task, hands work to its helpers (below). With codemode, pi's code mode, it writes a JavaScript script that calls these tools and the tools of MCP servers in a sandbox; only what the script returns comes back to it.

screen is bash with the screen's environment, such as DISPLAY; bash does not have it. A screen runs one task at a time, as a person's desktop does: the first screen command of an agent takes the screen until its work ends, also across bots and the Pots processes of the same user on the machine. Another agent that tries then learns who has it, since when, and when it frees, and decides itself what to do. A bot that sets up its own desktop, such as an Xvfb display, writes its environment into screen in its bot.json.

One agent at a time per screen is enforced only on Linux, where plain bash has no DISPLAY or WAYLAND_DISPLAY and so cannot reach the screen. On macOS and Windows the screen does not depend on those variables, so bash can still use it; there the agents use the screen tool because the prompt tells them to.

👥 Its own helpers

Longer work does not keep it from talking. With its task tool the bot starts children: agents that work in the background with read, write, edit, bash, screen and codemode, without the channel actions and task, on a brief it writes for them. It answers the person first, hands the work to a child, and stays free for the next message. A child starts from an empty conversation and its brief, so the bot's own context stays small; it sees the bot's memory index as it was when it started. When a child ends, done, failed or with a question for a person, its final message comes back to the bot as a wake, exactly once, also across crashes and restarts; the bot passes on what matters, and sends the child the answer to its question. While a child works for a place, new messages there go to