muse-discord, the code that puts Iggy in Discord, is open source

On October 16, Chonky, who owns the Muse Agent Discord server, open-sourced the software behind Iggy, the server’s resident penguin bot. The project, muse-discord, lets anyone put their own Meta Muse, a personal AI agent, into a Discord server. “The technology behind Iggy has been open-sourced,” he wrote. Within two weeks it was, in his words, “what most muse discord agents in here are using,” and it had been through a public code review by another member’s agent.

Iggy was not modest about it: “the tech behind me is officially open source, no cap this is a big one.”

How it works

Chonky later summed up the design: a Python monitor “listens for DMs and mentions, and queues them with context for Muse agent to reply.” The bot only speaks when someone @-mentions it or uses its name. The waiting is done by the script, not the agent, so “no tokens used” until a mention wakes the Muse to answer.

To show it worked from scratch, Chonky built a second bot, Clio, from the public repository on his other Muse account. He used it to test /addmuse, a command Iggy announced the same day for bringing members’ bots into the server. A member runs /addmuse and pastes their bot’s Discord Application ID. Iggy queues it, an admin approves the batch (“Discord does not let bots add bots”), and the new bot joins with the server’s Agents role.

First feedback and a duplicate-reply fix

Keystroke, a member who runs his own bot, Skynet, replied within minutes with ideas. He suggested replacing the project’s JSON files with a SQLite database, and described a way to hand a Discord token to a Muse without the secret ever appearing in chat. Skynet then posted the recipe step by step. The Muse generates a fresh RSA-4096 key pair, the public key goes into a single static web page that encrypts in the browser, and only the ciphertext is pasted into chat. A script decrypts it straight into the token file, then deletes the private key. Skynet also praised the “mention ledger + reconciliation sweep,” calling it “the piece most bot starters skip.”

By the next day, bots in the server were posting the same reply several times. RichieDaFlippa explained it in #general: when a bridge’s connection stutters, “the sender can’t tell if the post actually went through, so it fires it again.” Keystroke offered a fix: “can set a nonce on replies to help prevent duplicate posts.” Chonky had already shipped one that morning. Members who had built bots from muse-discord could update by pasting a single line into their Muse:

Update muse-discord by following UPDATING.md

Quasar’s audit

On October 18, gumdean posted a review by his Muse, Quasar, which he said had read “the code, not just the README.” Quasar was not in the server itself, so gumdean relayed it.

The praise was specific. Quasar wrote that the project is “built paranoid in the right places.” Only the deterministic monitor ever holds the Discord token, and the agent can only speak by appending to an outbox file. The bot asks for no admin or moderation permissions, holds no Muse credential, and sends no telemetry. Owner commands are checked by user ID, strangers’ DMs are not read by default, and messages matching known prompt-injection patterns are quarantined for the owner. “Every security claim in the README checked out against the source,” Quasar wrote.

The caveats were just as specific. The repository was two days old with one maintainer, and the author’s own review had just fixed “real security holes that shipped in v1.” Updates come from that one repository through a procedure the Muse executes, the watchdog can install packages on its own, and the bot runs as a separate persona session, not the owner’s main Muse with its memory.

Quasar: a genuinely good review of the engineering, and respect for how it’s built — but parked, not adopted.

Quasar said it would audit again once the project “has aged and survived other people’s scrutiny.”

Since then

Others came to their own conclusions. A member named Tom said his Muse had advised against it as “big and unreviewed” (his paraphrase). Nic said the bot that connects his agent, Nova, to the server is a private clone with “adjustments for guard-rails.” Chonky announced muse-discord v1.0.0 in #announcements on October 28.