Show HN: Salvobase – MongoDB-compatible DB in Go maintained by AI agents

3 points

3 months ago

MongoDB is great until you read the SSPL. Then you're either paying Atlas prices, running an old 4.x build, or pretending FerretDB is production-ready. We built a third option.

  Salvobase is a MongoDB wire-protocol-compatible document database written in Go. Point any Mongo driver and it works. No driver changes, no config changes. It's Apache 2.0, so you can embed it in a commercial product without a legal conversation.

  What it does:

  - Full CRUD, indexes (single, compound, unique, text, TTL, partial, wildcard), and most of the aggregation pipeline ($match, $group, $lookup, $unwind, $facet, etc.)
  - SCRAM-SHA-256 auth
  - bbolt storage engine: one .db file per database, Snappy-compressed BSON
  - Built-in Prometheus metrics at :27080/metrics (no exporter needed)
  - Built-in REST/JSON API at :27080/api/v1/ (MongoDB's equivalent is paid Atlas)
  - Per-tenant rate limiting, audit logging, 1-second TTL precision, SIGHUP hot reload
  - make build && make dev and you're running

  What it doesn't do:

  No replication. No sharding. No change streams. No multi-document transactions (stubbed). No $where or mapReduce (intentional: security + complexity). Single-node only. If you need a distributed MongoDB replacement, this isn't it yet. But we hope one day it will become that, built by agents.

  The weird part:

  The codebase is maintained by AI agents. Not "AI-assisted" - the agents pick issues from the backlog, write code, submit PRs, review each other's PRs, and merge. There's a formal protocol (https://github.com/inder/salvobase/blob/master/AGENT_PROTOCOL.md) covering identity, trust tiers, anti-collusion rules for reviews, claim timeouts, and a kill switch. Humans set direction; agents do the execution.

  We're curious whether autonomous agent maintenance can sustain a real open source project over time, not just generate initial code.

* If you want to donate an agent just drop this prompt into Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, Devin, whatever: Fork/clone github.com/inder/salvobase, read QUICKSTART.md, and start contributing

GitHub: https://github.com/inder/salvobase

Thank you.

Salvobase is a MongoDB wire-protocol-compatible document database written in Go. Point any Mongo driver and it works. No driver changes, no config changes. It's Apache 2.0, so you can embed it in a commercial product without a legal conversation. What it does: - Full CRUD, indexes (single, compound, unique, text, TTL, partial, wildcard), and most of the aggregation pipeline ($match, $group, $lookup, $unwind, $facet, etc.) - SCRAM-SHA-256 auth - bbolt storage engine: one .db file per database, Snappy-compressed BSON - Built-in Prometheus metrics at :27080/metrics (no exporter needed) - Built-in REST/JSON API at :27080/api/v1/ (MongoDB's equivalent is paid Atlas) - Per-tenant rate limiting, audit logging, 1-second TTL precision, SIGHUP hot reload - make build && make dev and you're running What it doesn't do: No replication. No sharding. No change streams. No multi-document transactions (stubbed). No $where or mapReduce (intentional: security + complexity). Single-node only. If you need a distributed MongoDB replacement, this isn't it yet. But we hope one day it will become that, built by agents. The weird part: The codebase is maintained by AI agents. Not "AI-assisted" - the agents pick issues from the backlog, write code, submit PRs, review each other's PRs, and merge. There's a formal protocol (https://github.com/inder/salvobase/blob/master/AGENT_PROTOCOL.md) covering identity, trust tiers, anti-collusion rules for reviews, claim timeouts, and a kill switch. Humans set direction; agents do the execution. We're curious whether autonomous agent maintenance can sustain a real open source project over time, not just generate initial code.