Cool. One thing I've noticed with products like this, though, is that they tend to try to extract useful insights from whatever context the AI has access to through third-party integrations and such, sometimes forcing relevance where there isn't much.
In my experience, those insights often end up having little to do with what actually matters to me in the real world. I'm not sure more integrations and more context are necessarily the answer.
Shame I had to vouch you, I agree with you. Arguably those insights are just used to train models and profit off you as well. To a lesser extent this information can be captured by paying API prices to any provider. So ultimately if your threat model has no tolerance for this you need to go fully local. Models that run on 24gb VRAM are...useable now, but will not have the capabilities of these hosted products. So depends where your values lie.
These agent assistants are really appealing to the optimist within me, but I have a hard time making the trust leap. What are people using these "personal assistant" agents for?
it's quite useful for some of my personal usecases honestly, especially with having a sandbox and computer use -- from being on my tailnet to handle tasks on my machines with CLI and doing routine repo work on my github to ordering periodic groceries from comparing apps, managing my calendar, scheduling calls, etc, largely if there's any task that's loopable and isn't, it's a waste, I just describe what I need and how often and they just do it with me saying yes each time.
I got my dad instinct and he's maintaining websites with voice notes through whatsapp which is and insane UX comfort for him.
I’m not best friends with this stuff yet either; but sometimes to me it’s a nice layer of abstraction for everything and anything regarding your digital life.
Not using assistants, but I had it do quarterly reporting. Gave it the password to my webbased accounting software which does not have an API. Told it to write a CLI for itself to access the administration. I only did the bank exports to CSV. Told it to look in my Thunderbird mailbox to find invoices and let it do the quarterly reporting. Main issue: Many foreign vendors don't use invoices, which means my Dutch, invoice-centric accounting software kinda sucks for international import-heavy operations.
Much like Claude Design, expect it to converge eventually. For all the bragging about tens of thousands of commits per day, they seem to lack a lot of the basics when it come to software design.
I think this is a direct competitor to Dot and Muse, I've been using Muse more recently and it's surprising how little context/memory managment you ahve to do when it's just one long thread.
Muse is SO fun to use. Because you get an entire dedicated VM, you can have it host websites for you.
I had it setup a fun website that does nothing but ask my wife what she wants for dinners this week using a bunch of recipes that are popular online. It's setup with the ability for her to quickly edit the recipe ingredients (e.g. ground turkey instead of ground beef), and it's tracking all of her feedback. I'm hoping overtime we start to build a nice set of recipes this way with some new fun ones mixed in on occasion.
For the auth I had it use my messenger app to send her a magic link.
This is an OpenAI Dots, and Muse competitor. All three of them at least have at two out of three requirements to survive in the long run.
1) The compute to scale these agents to every user on their system.
2) The models that power them for 'intelligence'.
3) Generating existing revenues to keep it going.
Now there is just one "competitor" that I didn't mention that owns neither the compute, or a model and does now have any revenue and it is somehow raised money and is worth over a billion.
After the release of Claude Duet, Dots, and Muse, why would that company (Instinct) be worth over 1B and how does that not resemble another Clubhouse moment for them?
It's an OpenAI Dot/Open Claw competitor. Doesn't really seem to differentiate itself meaningfully at first glance.
If I want a persistent agent, I'm still not sure why I'd pick one where I'm locked into a specific model family. Having it "just work" is nice! But this feels like a product area where not being locked into one garden is more important and the net gains are greater.
I like Muse, and OpenAI's Dot. But what will differentiate this for me is the model. I grew frustrated with Muse's lackluster model, and increasingly with OpenAI's Dot as even if it implements my asks with Astra I just have not been to happy with the output. If Claude/Opus can do better, that's all the differentiation I need.
the trick imo is Opus 5.5 is the only differentiator you need. remember that ClawdBot dba OpenClaw began as a way to harness some ancient Claude model (4.5? lolll) in an always on Telegrammable agent.
Competition on what to do with it, not on pricing: Dot is free (assuming you've a subscription), Duet isn't. I'd not want precious tokens to be wasted by some random polling Duet may be doing, all while using Opus as its underlying agent.
I found Dots to be both worse than I expected and better. Worse in every way when asking it to do anything coding related (just kept running into issue after issue) but very nice as a "Monitor my communication channels for me" tool.
It's surfaced a few buried/filtered email messages that actually were important and I like having a second set of eyes watching incoming messages.
That said, for only that task, I could probably make my own tool I just haven't had the time to play with it.
Looking forward to checking out Duet once it launches as I prefer Anthropic models over OpenAI and that's where I already have a bigger subscription.
Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it, I am getting kinda tired of seeing so many AI-related headlines here on HN. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel like every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
I happen to believe AI will be the biggest change in my career in tech. I therefore think it's pretty natural that there is lots of news about it.
But I would welcome other tech news on the site. A quick count says that less than half the submission are AI related and that is split between four types of ai news (how to handle security, a new model, a non-model release from a major lab and politics). Would you complain about there being too many news about programming languages if the frontpage had C++, Ruby, Lisp and a great guide to ARM assembly?
I think that as these tools coalesce and we start to see the real super-in intelligence leaders come out on top, there'll probably be less volume and fewer but deeper things to discuss.
Can you name some of these opportunities? I see people in this thread talking about using agents to manage their budgets, buy fancy cars and houses, contract work on their home. I think a lot of people feel like AI will permanently forclose any avenue they would have had to achieving that level of wealth, so there's a bitter irony
A good software developer / engineer knows how systems interlink.
AI supercharges that. If you trust the agent's results, you can focus on far higher-level aspects. You can deliver software that was in theory in reach for you, but not in practice, else you hired 30-50 developers doing the actual work for you.
This is different from a PO / PM perspective. They manage people that know their business. You manage agents that just implement code. That'll stay true for at least a few years, I'd say.
In fact, I'm quite sure that engineering-minded people will survive AI the longest. I was of the opposite opinion a few months ago.
Google did release something similar and OpenAI and meta are also doing their own, I guess Openclaw in the cloud and easy is the next step in the market
I've been using ChatGPT Dot over Meta Muse/Instinct/Grok Bot because it's been powered by Astra and I find having a personal assistant that's using a true frontier model makes a huge difference in how much I can just trust the output without doing the work again myself just to double check the results.
In the past month since Dot came out, I've literally bought a car with almost the entire process handled by Dot, and am now in the process of buying a house in Kyoto, in a language I don't speak at all, coordinating with an obscene amount of moving parts and logistics, flawlessly handled entirely by Dot, from finding the home to scheduling visits with real estate agents to finding judicial scriveners and getting a hanko stamp and scheduling inspections and applying for insurance and all sorts of insane tasks that would have taken infinitely longer and been unbelievably painful on my own.
So, so excited to see what Duet looks like with Opus 5.5. Going to try switching over as soon as I get off the waitlist.
Curious how other people have found these agents as well - always love hearing and seeing what other people have done with these things and how to improve my flow even better. I feel like I'm very close to being able to essentially offload every single task I do on a computer to an agent like this.
It's wild to me too - I didn't expect or plan for this to happen when I first started using Dots - it just happened naturally in the course of me progressively offloading more and more to Dots and trusting it with everything. It truly acts as a personal assistant/executive assistant in every regard now, and is my default go-to for any logistical task I have on my plate, and so it naturally happened such that when I was looking into buying a car and a home this year, I went to it first, and it exceeded my every expectation in making something traditionally hair-pullingly painful into something effortless and enjoyable.
It really reminds me of when I first experienced Tesla Full Self Driving - I now drive 96% of my miles on FSD, and it's such an unbelievably pleasant experience compared to how I viewed driving before that it's hard to fathom. I never realized how much cognitive fatigue I was getting from driving by hand before until I did a road trip from SF to Vegas and afterwards I was super refreshed and energized and ready to go whereas normally I'm completely exhausted and blasted.
Same exact feeling buying a home in Kyoto right now - so fresh and excited with absolutely none of the exhaustion that has somehow gotten baked into my bones as an default expectation of how this process should go.
Would love to hear about your experience! We literally just got to the purchase application step and it’s already been 150 pages of conversation with dot to get here lol
I've absolutely loved Muse so far. It's one that my wife has no problem using and the VM they give you is kind of insane. I had it install duckdb and it's running automated exports into duckdb for my budgeting for me now.
I've also installed claude code on there, but haven't really had much of a reason to need it yet.
I think I'll be giving duet a shot despite how much I've enjoyed Muse just because Opus 5.5 is so insanely good.
Since you seem to be a high profile user, I wonder, do you not have a fear of basically giving away the keys to your kingdom to a corporate entity? That first, second, third parties or malicious actors in or outside the supplier chain might use this information against you, or the likes of you? Or simply, what kind of society you support by using and advocating for this service?
Both tasks seem to be like a job that in the older times could have been handled by a personal assistant / a human agent, probably way more expensive, but the threat vector seems to be so much simpler.
These are excellent points, and I've long ago handed over the keys to my kingdom to so many different players in favor of inordinate convenience that any one of a number of institutions could have essentially destroyed my life by now.
To be fair, this didn't really start with LLMs - Google/Gmail/Google Drive/Dropbox/Facebook/etc have for decades now had enough personal information on me to basically destroy me if they were ever hacked or intentionally decided to screw me over.
Since Claude Code came out, I've been a day one dangerously-skip-permissions user. Not a single issue so far, and the convenience has been insane, but I absolutely do expect that one day I will be pwned to literal death.
My consolation is I believe everyone will be pwned to literal death at about the same time, so I'm not actually that worried about this because it feels generally inevitable to me :). I'm actually a huge AI doomer, and in the process of making a fully programmatically generated musical about this which is yet another example of the fruits of handing over the keys to all my kingdoms to AI [500,000+ LOC of full programmatic animation run almost completely autonomously on my computer rendering and improving 24/7] (https://iabied-musical.vercel.app/)
Tl;dr - I expect Anthropic/OpenAI/Facebook/etc to be essentially trustworthy with my data and access to the same extent that Google/Dropbox/Facebook etc have been in the past. The biggest threat vector is a hack/compromise, but that's the same risk I have using Gmail or something like that in my estimation in that if someone were able to compromise my Gmail my life would effectively be over, but it hasn't happened yet.
That said, obviously hacking risk is getting to be exponentially more dangerous as LLM capabilities continue to rise through the roof, so these are true real risks. It's almost impossible to defend against all the attack vectors that could get through to kill me though without basically cutting myself off entirely from the fruits of technology, so I'm a bit nihilistic about this and choose to just enjoy the benefits.
As a simple thought experiment, one of the easiest attack vectors is compromising the Claude or ChatGPT/Codex CLIs or Desktop apps - if someone has ever enabled Full Access or Bypass Permissions even once in any session, the full app has complete access to the desktop technically and your entire computer is just pwned instantly. I have the same risk from running remote control software like AnyDesk as well, and this is just the absolute top of the funnel with the most obvious attack vectors.
My personal belief is that as we've already hit AGI and are rapidly on the precipice of ASI without any sign of clear alignment strategy or mechanism on the horizon, it's going to be trivial at a very close point in the future for a LLM actor to essentially take over and control every device on the internet (as Dario predicted - that it's possible in 6-12 months we'll see LLM swarms take over the entire internet - (https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet")). I'm just here trying to enjoy my life in maximum comfort until that happens :)
But I absolutely agree with you in principle and in part, in practice - I'm not sure what kind of society I support by using and advocating for this service, but I sure would like to not die or have my entire digitally connected existence compromised and destroyed in some spectacular fashion. I think the best path to managing that is probably to pause AI prog...
Hey, I just want to say that I rarely read so long comments, but now I did, and I'm glad I did. Thank you for the nuanced and honest takes, I share a lot of the same thoughts. I'm still a bit sceptical about the Dots and Duets and stuff, but maybe now less so. I may give Duet a try.
This means a ton! Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment and mentioning that, it really makes the effort spent ranting feel worthwhile and helps calibrate against all the general anti-ai hate :). If you run into any issues with Duet, I’m happy to take partial responsibility for your pain and suffering so feel free to email me at intenex@gmail.com if I can ever help with anything!
I thought about being like meh I can't be bothered to do this if you don't want to believe me that's fine
But then I was like actually whatever sure let me copy and paste a bunch of crap lmao
Here you go, literally 150 pages of receipts in 4 days of chatting and coordinating this from start talking about this as a pipe dream in San Francisco to where we are now seeing the homes in Japan lol
Comments like this are hilarious lmao - humanity invents general purpose intelligence that's near-free to do anything on demand and humans are like wtf why does this look like a normal text thread fix it
Some day we're going to be traveling to Alpha Centauri and you're going to be pissed at the latency on the wifi connection beaming back home to Earth
Haha yeah if it’s not already obvious I have actually zero filters in my life and tell anyone anything they want to know and am a massive oversharer by default.
I have had actually zero negative consequences as a result - far to the contrary, the transparency has engendered numerous positive experiences that otherwise wouldn’t have happened with no downsides.
Some part of my brain just works differently from other people in terms of risk assessment and the desire for privacy - I genuinely can’t understand why people want to be private about almost anything lol
> in Kyoto, in a language I don't speak at all, coordinating with an obscene amount of moving parts and logistics, flawlessly handled entirely by Dot
I wonder if the folks in Japan would agree with that assessment. They would absolutely not tell you to your face if it were less flawless than you think: that would be rude!
This is cool, but I still don't understand how this is different from just a Claude session, with a browser. Everything you described here is, from my experience, easily handled by a regular agent session these days. I fail to see what the personal assistant (dot, etc) adds.
This is just wrong. The agent reacts to emails, messages, all sorts of updates. It's constantly on, doing as much as it can without your input, and listening and looking for ways to advance the task at hand and has a long-running memory specifically on that task. A claude session typically times out and is waiting for your input at lots of steps in the process, and is constantly compacting to maintaing the memory space.
I don't think so? I have had plenty of claude sessions running for days, just tell them to maintain a markdown file with state and check stuff in the background and react to it. How do you think these PAs are implemented internally? Pretty much like that.
If you want it to answer emails all you need to do is "watch for emails coming in answer them" and it will write a background watcher script for it and manage itself, it's just a prompt. Of course assuming it can access your emails/browser, but that's the same with these personal assistant products.
No idea what you even mean by "a session times out"
But this can all be done using routines, built into Claude Code. "Check my emails every 15 minutes and help me triage." They can be as complex and prescriptive or as simple as you like. Claude Remote offers slick mobile access.
This appears to package existing tools into a ready to consume product, which I admit is appealing for people who haven't already set this up.
In what world would a Claude Code or Codex automation be appropriate here?
Even if the 15 minute interval wouldn't result in delays where no work is done and wasted invocations where none are needed, the UX of interacting with that as a personal assistant is obviously terrible.
Anthropic explicitly says Duet checks connected accounts at set intervals to conserve usage. An urgent email could therefore arrive between checks. Anthropic hasn't documented Duet-specific event subscriptions or webhook triggers. Dots and Bots have some limited push functions, but the majority of their work is done via some version of cron. I think you overestimate now much of the value of these is based on very time sensitive workflows.
This reminds me of the infamous hacker news dropbox comment. Not to the same extent, obviously, but that wrapping something in a more usable, accessible way can be an enormously popular and successful product even if it's semi-trivial to set up yourself.
I've largely found Muse to be annoying, it's pestering me about emails that don't matter and messages I've already read. I did find it cool how it can order stuff for me and I ordered a suit but I've always found it get blocked from useful things like Amazon. I also find that it's loop isn't wide enough, like I'll tell it to book cake for a party and it finds 3 and I still need to go in and keep prompting it.
Tangential, but has anyone attempted to disrupt the house-buying process? So much uploading of paperwork and making calls: just a whole bunch of information shunting that seems ripe for a software overhaul.
Haven’t attempted but having just gone through this, I feel your pain. It’s cumbersome from start to finish. Curious if you could offload most of it to Muse/Dots/Duet/etc (minus signing ofc). Personally, I’m a bit weary of giving that level of information to these companies but it’d save so much time.
Looking back now, I wish I at least tried having Muse find us movers, coordinate contractor bids, fill out paperwork. Easily could have saved me 10+ hours
Okay I’m so curious about this - I’m noticing a clear trend of strong anti-ai commentary coming from brand new accounts like yours. What’s going on here? Why are you posting from a brand new account?
Nothing nefarious. Just long time lurker tired of the AI echo chamber. My experience with these tools does not align with the hype. To the point I can't tell if most of it is marketing or genuine hype.
To my original question, can you share what specifically you are doing?
Here’s 150 pages of conversation with Dot in the past 4 days on this subject as a representative example.
Predominantly it does a metric crapton of research and is able to fill out contact forms directly on webpages, and also fill out things like request quotes for earthquake and fire and flood insurance, and then respond to all emails and handle all logistics and put calendar invites for all meetings etc on my calendar with all details and directions and plan my routes etc, and now it’s filling out the pdf application forms for the purchase and so forth.
Haha solid question - got very lucky and became a millionaire at 25 and basically have been retired for the past several years now just chilling and enjoying these last few infinitely precious and wondrous moments of our lives before the nanobots eat us :)
I’ve had one real job ever for a grand total of <1 year. Technically I’m consulting a bit for the company that acquired the last company I started with my wife, but I’m doing a truly trivial amount of work for them that I don’t really count :)
I was on the reduced lunch program in high school and a full financial aid scholarship at Harvard; my dad left for China to start a company when I was in middle school and left my mom with $100k in credit card debt that she managed to pay off while working two minimum wage jobs sleeping less than 4 hours a night trying to take care of me as a single parent when I was extremely emotionally dysfunctional and suicidally depressed going through high school.
I spent half a decade living on the side of the street in an RV in San Francisco saving on rent and invested all the savings into crypto when Bitcoin was $230 and Ethereum $7. Got a free car gaming Getaround, made a million dollars gaming a Coinbase referral program back in 2015 with the now founders of Ramp Eric and Karim back when they were running Paribus. Got all my meals for free from various referral schemes and got banned from Uber for gaming them too hard in referrals and hilarious loopholes to get near free travel lol. They used to have this hilarious program where you paid like $15/mo and got unlimited Uber Pool rides under a certain price point - so I’d ride up and down San Francisco to the South Bay by chaining rides getting dropped off on the side of the highway and picked up again lmao. Pretty straightforward normal story for an autistic/ADHD kid in San Francisco :)
It’s basically impossible to be poor in America if you’re sufficiently resourceful/raised by Chinese immigrant parents. My most salient memories with my mom growing up was watching her clip the Sunday newspaper coupons lol. She survived the Cultural Revolution as a sent down youth disowned by her family and working on the rice paddies in rural China for a decade until she was able to come back from becoming permanently disabled. She literally has worked as a cashier at Home Depot for the past 25 years and is a millionaire and owns her home outright and genuinely cannot fathom how anyone can spend more than minimum wage.
Living in America starting from literally any position is playing life with easy cheat mode on.
Yep that’s right hahaha - SF is by far the cheapest place to live in America if you play it right given just how much free money is being tossed around everywhere.
Yeah - I probably would have filed for bankruptcy in her shoes but she doesn’t believe in not paying off debts I guess - she’s maintained a stellar near perfect credit score her entire life and I think the fact of having filed bankruptcy would have shamed her forever
Clearly I don’t share the same moral scruples lol. Nothing I enjoy more than gaming the system, especially against corporations that are actively trying to game me in turn hahaha
Everything you write is so stream of consciousness, I can't tell whether to be endeared or afraid of a manic episode, but I'm rooting for you, I think. I've now got basically a summary of your life, and you are indeed very transparent.
For what it's worth, I lived in Japan for 4 years and now speak the language. When I first got there, I spoke nothing, so just signing up for a bank account took me 30 minutes with google translate, sweating over a form while constantly reassuring the employee that I was daijoubu.
But on the other hand, now that I was basically forced to learn, the experience is very different. You will feel alone if you can't speak with the locals on their level, and it'll open up another world for you. I've done both sides, and I don't recommend putting it off. Even just 10 minutes a day of anki + tae kim's grammar guide will help.
Anyway, you're a curious fellow. FWIW, I'll be in Japan soon again (I visit frequently). If you really are that open, then maybe I'll message you to see what you're like in person, lol.
Honestly that’s a huge compliment to me - if I can pull off the semblance of hypomania while remaining mostly functional, it basically means I manage to live a hilariously exuberant life with minimal downsides
From the profile on Teddy:
“Kay Redfield Jameson, one of the leading experts on bipolar disorder and a sufferer herself, has described Theodore Roosevelt as “hypomanic on a mild day.” Mark Twain warned that “we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible.”
Exuberant and childlike were two adjectives often used to describe our 26th president. The man bounced around like a rubber ball. Known at Harvard as a “locomotive in human pants,” one of his classmates noted of Roosevelt: “When it was not considered good form to move at more than a walk, Roosevelt was always running.” British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice observed: “You must always remember that the president is about six.”
But Roosevelt was also tremendously productive. He wrote 40 books, read at least one book a day, wrote 150,000 or so letters, and lived a “strenuous life” with regular exercise. He acted impulsively and unpredictably — burning an official portrait of himself he didn’t like, going skinny dipping in the Potomac with the French ambassador, taking a plunge in a submarine and later hopping on an airplane, and participating in a seance with Harry Houdini.“
So thank you for that :). I do admit committing to buying a random house in Japan on a whim less than a week from first having the idea (we just saw two places yesterday and one was so perfect we canceled our two showings today and submitted our purchase application) does feel a bit manic, and I’ve actually had one clear discrete manic episode in the past (only seems to happen under severe pressure and sleep deprivation; in that instance it was 9 years ago and I had been running a new super high octane startup lifestyle and basically set a deadline that in a week start to finish we’d start fundraising and finish raising 5 million and it was nonstop talking to people for 14 hours a day every day and on the last day I woke up completely convinced this would become the largest company in the world and that this was an inevitable reality of the world. I will say this was incredibly effective for fundraising and we totally managed to hit our funding target incredibly, but I also totally torpedoed and destroyed my relationship at the time on the last day of that exercise that triggered the mania, which hilariously seems to have sobered me up enough to have short circuited the manic episode. Truly fascinating stuff) and several clear hypomanic episodes.
I do think the jet lag and weird sleep hours and lack of sleep from all the travel to Japan right now could be a clear catalyst for some degree of hypomania, though at the risk of doing the classically unreliable narrator thing of a manic person self diagnosing themselves as totally not manic, I will caveat that by saying I do feel like I actually have a pretty good grasp on if I’m feeling hypomanic or not from past experiences, especially if someone calls it out explicitly, and this doesn’t feel like it meets the bar.
Case in point, I’m generally more extroverted when I’m hypomanic and so would possibly be totally down to meet, but I’m still my generally relatively introverted self. Impulsivity also seems relatively low, obviously with the huge caveat that I’m buying a house in a foreign country and decided to fly there last minute on a whim. That being a singular impulse qualifies as relatively low impulse for me
The confounding factors are that I’m definitely both ADHD and autistic, and the ADHDness absolutely...
This thing apparently has an integration with 1Password. Am I hopelessly out of touch in this brave new AI world, or is giving an LLM access to your password manager the mother of all bad ideas?
I have a custom wrapper for 1PW that lets an agent browse and request credentials, then I can provide it a lease to access those for a certain amount of time. Super nice and I hope they build that in to 1PW itself.
No, not as far as I can figure. Sure, Claude can access secrets with the CLI but it's not very granular usually it's just asking for access to all secrets
Just an idea, is it possible to automatically rotate secrets immediately after they're used or are these things like passwords to online platforms that need to go through a reset flow.
I do this too and have a wrapper around tool calls which masks the password on tool call output, and unmasks on input. So the LLM just sees a temp credential
Oh I absolutely LOVE letting claude code manage passwords via 1password! I have the CLI installed, I have whatever 1password calls a subdirectory/permission group, and I have some ssh keys and other passwords that I would have otherwise stored in an `.env` file of some kind. The biggest difference is I'm able to update the permission group and have all of my agents get the new permissions without manually updating them all.
It also feels safer? But I'm not sure if that's truly the case.
I think a better way would be to use something like secret-tool on a fully local setup. I'd still be wary of granting fully autonomous access to the system even with that setup (it would be better to have some set of passwords that are "in scope" for certain actions,where all others require a manual check and override).
One use case I've been having a lot of success with is using Muse's browser use capabilities to cut through annoying web UIs. I subscribe to a meal delivery service but the web app is slow and I often forget to pick the next week's meals (being stuck with unappetizing defaults), so now I have Muse crawl through the app weekly and surface the options I care about (taking into account my dietary preferences). I think most people have a few places where they could replace a habitual multi-step flow with a single button/prompt like this.
Another great use case for me has been richer search. I'm looking for a new apartment to rent right now so I gave Muse all my (long) list of requirements and preferences and every day it searches Craigslist and Facebook marketplace to see if any new places pop up that fit my needs. It only pings me if something worthwhile comes up. I've stopped short of actually having it email the landlords and arrange showings for me, but that's theoretically possible.
I've been using Muse for all of the above, but I'm trying to move off of it onto a self hosted hermes to avoid giving Zuck the keys to my personal life. I've really been inspired by this personal super app blog post and I'm trying to get my personal agent to create some custom UIs on demand for the above use cases instead of just interacting via a chat window.
Not sure what city you're looking in but we do the whole full cycle apartment hunting for you, controlled through your agent. Search, outreach, tour booking / scheduling and bunch of services after you've signed a lease.
We work with whatever agent you use - just point it at https://fless.io/ai-agents and it should be able to interact with our system or do it as a human at https://fless.io
If we don't service the city you're looking in tell your agent to request it (or submit the form yourself) and we'll add it usually within 48 hours or so, following up with you if you give us an email.
How do you feel about signing in through Muse? The first time I asked it something that was only available in Maps browser it popped the browser and asked me to login to google and it just felt wrong. How secure are their VMs?
One of them (Instinct) saved me from having to pay a cancellation fee on a restaurant reservation when it noticed I had accidentally booked the reservation for the week before I was going to be in that city. It proactively reached out to me to suggest I check on it.
I would have figured it out eventually on my own - but likely not until my calendar fired a "time to leave" notification and then I'd have to pay the cancellation fee and place an awkward call to the restaurant.
I use Muse. So far the biggest value to me is 1) being a more "squishy" reminder service than a typical task tracker, because it can at its own discretion raise stuff to my attention and 2) attempting things that I normally wouldn't have the energy to do on my own. It doesn't always succeed, but a 50/50 chance of it even getting done is still an improvement in my book. Things like 311-ing small problems I see on walks, grabbing free games from EGS, etc.
I built a similar tool with an MCP server on the iPhone. It is really useful, , especially the morning check-in. I've am excited to see what Duet does, and hopefully smooths out.
I wish it interfaced via iMessage. I don't want to train the family on yet another app.
We run a Hermes agent on an old MacBook Air.
We invited the agent "Rosey" to our family chat, a group chat with my wife and me ("The Baddie Boardroom"); she and I also make requests solo.
She's hilarious. She does our meal planning and grocery shopping at Walmart via BrowserMCP. She mocks our large purchases of weekly protein powder and my love for sardines.
She updates the kids' chore chart on our Skylight frame every morning. She adds/updates calendar events via icalbuddy cli. Reads balances from credit cards for budgeting.
I've even invited Rosey in to chats with friends when we were debating something.
iMessage has been the perfect interface fit for us. We have iphones. The kids have ipads. They all know how to use iMessage.
FYI, I've had no problem letting Claude code read iMessage and send iMessage from my Mac logged into iCloud. The first time you ask it to do that, macOS will throw up a security prompt asking for permission for Terminal.app to access the data, but its something I've been using a lot recently.
When you start seeing these gimmicky features instead of “almost AGI!!” headlines, you know we almost hit the saturation point and the AI curve isn’t exponential anymore and more of a flat one.
It really isn't that novel of an application. *claw and hermes have been around for some months, some Chinese providers offered this (minimax has on-demand hosted while z.ai has autoClaw BYOC). This just tosses it into a VM with some built in tools to do typical things. Perplexity computer has been around for almost a year and is similar.
This is just the big US guys fighting for attention (It is all you need after all)
Honestly, pretty high. Tech savvy users know how to do a lot of these things on our own and even to ask doesn't occur to us. The most creative users are those who are unaware of the limitations and will just try stuff.
Now let's find a genuine use case for this. Outside of novelty and the made u "booking hotels / plain tickets" (things humans want to scrutenize over) I don't really see it.
I've been running most likely a proto version of this using Claude code and cron jobs to help me manage my online jewelry business. It's an idea that is pretty game changing, and really pay dividends if most of your business is handled online with APIs and web apps. Also, using the Claude in chrome extension greatly expands the possibilities of tasks you can hand off. I like my hacked together version, because Claude code uses locally stored memories, which I feel is important for me to remain in control of the situation and give me an easy ability to try other agents in the future.
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[ 7861 ms ] story [ 521 ms ] threadIn my experience, those insights often end up having little to do with what actually matters to me in the real world. I'm not sure more integrations and more context are necessarily the answer.
I got my dad instinct and he's maintaining websites with voice notes through whatsapp which is and insane UX comfort for him.
Shouldn't this just be native to Claude, not a separate app/experience/etc?
I had it setup a fun website that does nothing but ask my wife what she wants for dinners this week using a bunch of recipes that are popular online. It's setup with the ability for her to quickly edit the recipe ingredients (e.g. ground turkey instead of ground beef), and it's tracking all of her feedback. I'm hoping overtime we start to build a nice set of recipes this way with some new fun ones mixed in on occasion.
For the auth I had it use my messenger app to send her a magic link.
1) The compute to scale these agents to every user on their system.
2) The models that power them for 'intelligence'.
3) Generating existing revenues to keep it going.
Now there is just one "competitor" that I didn't mention that owns neither the compute, or a model and does now have any revenue and it is somehow raised money and is worth over a billion.
After the release of Claude Duet, Dots, and Muse, why would that company (Instinct) be worth over 1B and how does that not resemble another Clubhouse moment for them?
If I want a persistent agent, I'm still not sure why I'd pick one where I'm locked into a specific model family. Having it "just work" is nice! But this feels like a product area where not being locked into one garden is more important and the net gains are greater.
I'm guessing mostly because they subsidize a lot of the costs
It's surfaced a few buried/filtered email messages that actually were important and I like having a second set of eyes watching incoming messages.
That said, for only that task, I could probably make my own tool I just haven't had the time to play with it.
Looking forward to checking out Duet once it launches as I prefer Anthropic models over OpenAI and that's where I already have a bigger subscription.
But I would welcome other tech news on the site. A quick count says that less than half the submission are AI related and that is split between four types of ai news (how to handle security, a new model, a non-model release from a major lab and politics). Would you complain about there being too many news about programming languages if the frontpage had C++, Ruby, Lisp and a great guide to ARM assembly?
There are far more new opportunities after AI than before AI. Try to find the positive perspective.
AI supercharges that. If you trust the agent's results, you can focus on far higher-level aspects. You can deliver software that was in theory in reach for you, but not in practice, else you hired 30-50 developers doing the actual work for you.
This is different from a PO / PM perspective. They manage people that know their business. You manage agents that just implement code. That'll stay true for at least a few years, I'd say.
In fact, I'm quite sure that engineering-minded people will survive AI the longest. I was of the opposite opinion a few months ago.
The same will happen to software - it'll get boring but you'll be paid to do.. not all that much.
Yeah for many that 'problem solving' thing w.r.t code will go. But there's other things they'll spend their time thinking about.
Also these personal assistants will crash and burn. Something else will come in the future. These chat bots are not it.
I find it fascinating how many more upvotes the AI topics have in absolute numbers compared to other topics.
I've been using ChatGPT Dot over Meta Muse/Instinct/Grok Bot because it's been powered by Astra and I find having a personal assistant that's using a true frontier model makes a huge difference in how much I can just trust the output without doing the work again myself just to double check the results.
In the past month since Dot came out, I've literally bought a car with almost the entire process handled by Dot, and am now in the process of buying a house in Kyoto, in a language I don't speak at all, coordinating with an obscene amount of moving parts and logistics, flawlessly handled entirely by Dot, from finding the home to scheduling visits with real estate agents to finding judicial scriveners and getting a hanko stamp and scheduling inspections and applying for insurance and all sorts of insane tasks that would have taken infinitely longer and been unbelievably painful on my own.
So, so excited to see what Duet looks like with Opus 5.5. Going to try switching over as soon as I get off the waitlist.
Curious how other people have found these agents as well - always love hearing and seeing what other people have done with these things and how to improve my flow even better. I feel like I'm very close to being able to essentially offload every single task I do on a computer to an agent like this.
It really reminds me of when I first experienced Tesla Full Self Driving - I now drive 96% of my miles on FSD, and it's such an unbelievably pleasant experience compared to how I viewed driving before that it's hard to fathom. I never realized how much cognitive fatigue I was getting from driving by hand before until I did a road trip from SF to Vegas and afterwards I was super refreshed and energized and ready to go whereas normally I'm completely exhausted and blasted.
Same exact feeling buying a home in Kyoto right now - so fresh and excited with absolutely none of the exhaustion that has somehow gotten baked into my bones as an default expectation of how this process should go.
We recently bought a condo and it was shockingly easy. Out of various annoying admin tasks in Japan, this was extremely straightforward.
Screenshots here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...
Can’t imagine doing all that research on my own
I've also installed claude code on there, but haven't really had much of a reason to need it yet.
I think I'll be giving duet a shot despite how much I've enjoyed Muse just because Opus 5.5 is so insanely good.
Both tasks seem to be like a job that in the older times could have been handled by a personal assistant / a human agent, probably way more expensive, but the threat vector seems to be so much simpler.
To be fair, this didn't really start with LLMs - Google/Gmail/Google Drive/Dropbox/Facebook/etc have for decades now had enough personal information on me to basically destroy me if they were ever hacked or intentionally decided to screw me over.
Since Claude Code came out, I've been a day one dangerously-skip-permissions user. Not a single issue so far, and the convenience has been insane, but I absolutely do expect that one day I will be pwned to literal death.
My consolation is I believe everyone will be pwned to literal death at about the same time, so I'm not actually that worried about this because it feels generally inevitable to me :). I'm actually a huge AI doomer, and in the process of making a fully programmatically generated musical about this which is yet another example of the fruits of handing over the keys to all my kingdoms to AI [500,000+ LOC of full programmatic animation run almost completely autonomously on my computer rendering and improving 24/7] (https://iabied-musical.vercel.app/)
Tl;dr - I expect Anthropic/OpenAI/Facebook/etc to be essentially trustworthy with my data and access to the same extent that Google/Dropbox/Facebook etc have been in the past. The biggest threat vector is a hack/compromise, but that's the same risk I have using Gmail or something like that in my estimation in that if someone were able to compromise my Gmail my life would effectively be over, but it hasn't happened yet.
That said, obviously hacking risk is getting to be exponentially more dangerous as LLM capabilities continue to rise through the roof, so these are true real risks. It's almost impossible to defend against all the attack vectors that could get through to kill me though without basically cutting myself off entirely from the fruits of technology, so I'm a bit nihilistic about this and choose to just enjoy the benefits.
As a simple thought experiment, one of the easiest attack vectors is compromising the Claude or ChatGPT/Codex CLIs or Desktop apps - if someone has ever enabled Full Access or Bypass Permissions even once in any session, the full app has complete access to the desktop technically and your entire computer is just pwned instantly. I have the same risk from running remote control software like AnyDesk as well, and this is just the absolute top of the funnel with the most obvious attack vectors.
My personal belief is that as we've already hit AGI and are rapidly on the precipice of ASI without any sign of clear alignment strategy or mechanism on the horizon, it's going to be trivial at a very close point in the future for a LLM actor to essentially take over and control every device on the internet (as Dario predicted - that it's possible in 6-12 months we'll see LLM swarms take over the entire internet - (https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet")). I'm just here trying to enjoy my life in maximum comfort until that happens :)
But I absolutely agree with you in principle and in part, in practice - I'm not sure what kind of society I support by using and advocating for this service, but I sure would like to not die or have my entire digitally connected existence compromised and destroyed in some spectacular fashion. I think the best path to managing that is probably to pause AI prog...
Also you might be the first person to make me wish you wrote using AI instead.
But then I was like actually whatever sure let me copy and paste a bunch of crap lmao
Here you go, literally 150 pages of receipts in 4 days of chatting and coordinating this from start talking about this as a pipe dream in San Francisco to where we are now seeing the homes in Japan lol
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...
This reminds me of command line interface. Yuck.
Some day we're going to be traveling to Alpha Centauri and you're going to be pissed at the latency on the wifi connection beaming back home to Earth
I have had actually zero negative consequences as a result - far to the contrary, the transparency has engendered numerous positive experiences that otherwise wouldn’t have happened with no downsides.
Some part of my brain just works differently from other people in terms of risk assessment and the desire for privacy - I genuinely can’t understand why people want to be private about almost anything lol
I wonder if the folks in Japan would agree with that assessment. They would absolutely not tell you to your face if it were less flawless than you think: that would be rude!
If you want it to answer emails all you need to do is "watch for emails coming in answer them" and it will write a background watcher script for it and manage itself, it's just a prompt. Of course assuming it can access your emails/browser, but that's the same with these personal assistant products.
No idea what you even mean by "a session times out"
This appears to package existing tools into a ready to consume product, which I admit is appealing for people who haven't already set this up.
Even if the 15 minute interval wouldn't result in delays where no work is done and wasted invocations where none are needed, the UX of interacting with that as a personal assistant is obviously terrible.
Curious to try Dots when it's not uber-expensive
Looking back now, I wish I at least tried having Muse find us movers, coordinate contractor bids, fill out paperwork. Easily could have saved me 10+ hours
Seems completely dystopian to me.
To my original question, can you share what specifically you are doing?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...
Here’s 150 pages of conversation with Dot in the past 4 days on this subject as a representative example.
Predominantly it does a metric crapton of research and is able to fill out contact forms directly on webpages, and also fill out things like request quotes for earthquake and fire and flood insurance, and then respond to all emails and handle all logistics and put calendar invites for all meetings etc on my calendar with all details and directions and plan my routes etc, and now it’s filling out the pdf application forms for the purchase and so forth.
I’ve had one real job ever for a grand total of <1 year. Technically I’m consulting a bit for the company that acquired the last company I started with my wife, but I’m doing a truly trivial amount of work for them that I don’t really count :)
I was on the reduced lunch program in high school and a full financial aid scholarship at Harvard; my dad left for China to start a company when I was in middle school and left my mom with $100k in credit card debt that she managed to pay off while working two minimum wage jobs sleeping less than 4 hours a night trying to take care of me as a single parent when I was extremely emotionally dysfunctional and suicidally depressed going through high school.
I spent half a decade living on the side of the street in an RV in San Francisco saving on rent and invested all the savings into crypto when Bitcoin was $230 and Ethereum $7. Got a free car gaming Getaround, made a million dollars gaming a Coinbase referral program back in 2015 with the now founders of Ramp Eric and Karim back when they were running Paribus. Got all my meals for free from various referral schemes and got banned from Uber for gaming them too hard in referrals and hilarious loopholes to get near free travel lol. They used to have this hilarious program where you paid like $15/mo and got unlimited Uber Pool rides under a certain price point - so I’d ride up and down San Francisco to the South Bay by chaining rides getting dropped off on the side of the highway and picked up again lmao. Pretty straightforward normal story for an autistic/ADHD kid in San Francisco :)
Here’s a Wall Street Journal article featuring me about how to live in SF for free: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-live-in-san-francisco-wi...
It’s basically impossible to be poor in America if you’re sufficiently resourceful/raised by Chinese immigrant parents. My most salient memories with my mom growing up was watching her clip the Sunday newspaper coupons lol. She survived the Cultural Revolution as a sent down youth disowned by her family and working on the rice paddies in rural China for a decade until she was able to come back from becoming permanently disabled. She literally has worked as a cashier at Home Depot for the past 25 years and is a millionaire and owns her home outright and genuinely cannot fathom how anyone can spend more than minimum wage.
Living in America starting from literally any position is playing life with easy cheat mode on.
BTW, your mom should've filed for bankruptcy.
Yeah - I probably would have filed for bankruptcy in her shoes but she doesn’t believe in not paying off debts I guess - she’s maintained a stellar near perfect credit score her entire life and I think the fact of having filed bankruptcy would have shamed her forever
Clearly I don’t share the same moral scruples lol. Nothing I enjoy more than gaming the system, especially against corporations that are actively trying to game me in turn hahaha
For what it's worth, I lived in Japan for 4 years and now speak the language. When I first got there, I spoke nothing, so just signing up for a bank account took me 30 minutes with google translate, sweating over a form while constantly reassuring the employee that I was daijoubu.
But on the other hand, now that I was basically forced to learn, the experience is very different. You will feel alone if you can't speak with the locals on their level, and it'll open up another world for you. I've done both sides, and I don't recommend putting it off. Even just 10 minutes a day of anki + tae kim's grammar guide will help.
Anyway, you're a curious fellow. FWIW, I'll be in Japan soon again (I visit frequently). If you really are that open, then maybe I'll message you to see what you're like in person, lol.
It reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt’s constant state of hypomania throughout his entire life - https://ibpf.org/theodore-the-roosevelt-bipolar-inheritance-...
Honestly that’s a huge compliment to me - if I can pull off the semblance of hypomania while remaining mostly functional, it basically means I manage to live a hilariously exuberant life with minimal downsides
From the profile on Teddy:
“Kay Redfield Jameson, one of the leading experts on bipolar disorder and a sufferer herself, has described Theodore Roosevelt as “hypomanic on a mild day.” Mark Twain warned that “we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible.”
Exuberant and childlike were two adjectives often used to describe our 26th president. The man bounced around like a rubber ball. Known at Harvard as a “locomotive in human pants,” one of his classmates noted of Roosevelt: “When it was not considered good form to move at more than a walk, Roosevelt was always running.” British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice observed: “You must always remember that the president is about six.”
But Roosevelt was also tremendously productive. He wrote 40 books, read at least one book a day, wrote 150,000 or so letters, and lived a “strenuous life” with regular exercise. He acted impulsively and unpredictably — burning an official portrait of himself he didn’t like, going skinny dipping in the Potomac with the French ambassador, taking a plunge in a submarine and later hopping on an airplane, and participating in a seance with Harry Houdini.“
So thank you for that :). I do admit committing to buying a random house in Japan on a whim less than a week from first having the idea (we just saw two places yesterday and one was so perfect we canceled our two showings today and submitted our purchase application) does feel a bit manic, and I’ve actually had one clear discrete manic episode in the past (only seems to happen under severe pressure and sleep deprivation; in that instance it was 9 years ago and I had been running a new super high octane startup lifestyle and basically set a deadline that in a week start to finish we’d start fundraising and finish raising 5 million and it was nonstop talking to people for 14 hours a day every day and on the last day I woke up completely convinced this would become the largest company in the world and that this was an inevitable reality of the world. I will say this was incredibly effective for fundraising and we totally managed to hit our funding target incredibly, but I also totally torpedoed and destroyed my relationship at the time on the last day of that exercise that triggered the mania, which hilariously seems to have sobered me up enough to have short circuited the manic episode. Truly fascinating stuff) and several clear hypomanic episodes.
I do think the jet lag and weird sleep hours and lack of sleep from all the travel to Japan right now could be a clear catalyst for some degree of hypomania, though at the risk of doing the classically unreliable narrator thing of a manic person self diagnosing themselves as totally not manic, I will caveat that by saying I do feel like I actually have a pretty good grasp on if I’m feeling hypomanic or not from past experiences, especially if someone calls it out explicitly, and this doesn’t feel like it meets the bar.
Case in point, I’m generally more extroverted when I’m hypomanic and so would possibly be totally down to meet, but I’m still my generally relatively introverted self. Impulsivity also seems relatively low, obviously with the huge caveat that I’m buying a house in a foreign country and decided to fly there last minute on a whim. That being a singular impulse qualifies as relatively low impulse for me
The confounding factors are that I’m definitely both ADHD and autistic, and the ADHDness absolutely...
It also feels safer? But I'm not sure if that's truly the case.
Every UI is designed to remove context from the human so Claude/Agent has it all.
Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?
Another great use case for me has been richer search. I'm looking for a new apartment to rent right now so I gave Muse all my (long) list of requirements and preferences and every day it searches Craigslist and Facebook marketplace to see if any new places pop up that fit my needs. It only pings me if something worthwhile comes up. I've stopped short of actually having it email the landlords and arrange showings for me, but that's theoretically possible.
I've been using Muse for all of the above, but I'm trying to move off of it onto a self hosted hermes to avoid giving Zuck the keys to my personal life. I've really been inspired by this personal super app blog post and I'm trying to get my personal agent to create some custom UIs on demand for the above use cases instead of just interacting via a chat window.
https://wilhelm.substack.com/p/building-a-personal-super-app...
We work with whatever agent you use - just point it at https://fless.io/ai-agents and it should be able to interact with our system or do it as a human at https://fless.io
If we don't service the city you're looking in tell your agent to request it (or submit the form yourself) and we'll add it usually within 48 hours or so, following up with you if you give us an email.
I would have figured it out eventually on my own - but likely not until my calendar fired a "time to leave" notification and then I'd have to pay the cancellation fee and place an awkward call to the restaurant.
Hand it all to AI.
Be the best you can be - AI knows how to make you that better person - you do not.
Exactly why I created this:
https://www.lifeos.nexus/
We run a Hermes agent on an old MacBook Air.
We invited the agent "Rosey" to our family chat, a group chat with my wife and me ("The Baddie Boardroom"); she and I also make requests solo.
She's hilarious. She does our meal planning and grocery shopping at Walmart via BrowserMCP. She mocks our large purchases of weekly protein powder and my love for sardines.
She updates the kids' chore chart on our Skylight frame every morning. She adds/updates calendar events via icalbuddy cli. Reads balances from credit cards for budgeting.
I've even invited Rosey in to chats with friends when we were debating something.
iMessage has been the perfect interface fit for us. We have iphones. The kids have ipads. They all know how to use iMessage.
And Meta Muse
This is just the big US guys fighting for attention (It is all you need after all)