Show HN: Salvobase – MongoDB-compatible DB in Go maintained by AI agents
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.
GitHub: https://github.com/inder/salvobase
Thank you.
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