I suspect that Dots and Duet are very high margin drivers for the labs. Personal assistant chat sessions don’t have to be realtime, so workloads can be scheduled on low priority batches and be waited if higher value work comes into a queue.
Inference providers are always trying to fill inference batches and having a stream of low priority requests can help pack batches that might have gone empty, without raising the latency of higher priority requests such as live chat sessions.
While Dot and Duet certainly need to be useful to work out as products, I think the gross margin mechanics are just as interesting.
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.
My first thought is that, before LLMs, getting out of your comfort zone to work with folks in Kyoto in their language would have been an important step in getting yourself ready to live there successfully. It would have been difficult and awkward, but that's part of the process. Or it was. I wish you luck once you get there.
That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.
Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"
Hahaha thankfully I'm spoiled in that my wife is Japanese :)
I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.
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.
Haha thanks for asking! A couple reasons - first and foremost, Japan is just awesome lol. I have a personal connection that's prominent in the fact that my wife is Japanese, but beyond that, there's a confluence of universally applicable reasons why buying a house in Japan is kind of an insane proposition:
Homes are insanely cheap and get massively devalued over timeframes that would be mindboggling to Americans. In SF, I live in a literally 110 year old home that's clearly breaking down in multiple dimensions and yet just keeps inexorably appreciating year over year and is now worth something like $2.5 million for a 2200 sqft place.
In Kyoto, the top contender we're looking at is an 832 sqft unit that was build in the 80s and newly renovated in the past few years and is...9.8 million JPY, aka $62,000. Literally less than a year of rent in my SF place can buy the Kyoto home outright lol.
Incredibly conveniently located, 6 minutes walking from Ogura station, and a ~20-25 minute ride from there to the heart of Kyoto - one of the most beautiful and iconic cities in the world, and you can get an amazing home outright for $62k there?
The exchange rate from USD to JPY makes this especially compelling right now, being at a mind-boggling high for the USD that, adjusted for inflation, makes the exchange rate almost the best it's been in half a century.
My wife and I also happen to get free flights so it's super easy for us to take a direct flight every month from SFO-KIX, which is what we're planning to do - basically spending a ~week here every month.
Japan as it stands right now is hands down the clear pareto frontier in terms of cost and quality of life - no other developed country comes close in terms of just how insanely affordable it is (a nice sit down meal literally costs ~$5-10 a person, especially with insane lunch deals at izakayas and the like - I've eaten sit down soba/udon meals that are 500 yen each, or literally ~$3, tax and tip included), and I'd argue no other developed country also comes close in terms of how nice life is, period, not even adjusting for price. The crime rate is literally nonexistent, everything is wildly clean, the public transit is unrivaled, the food is some of the best in the world if not the actual best, the culture is also world class, the heritage the same, the fashion the same, etc etc - basically everything is just better about Japan lmao.
Highly recommend everyone look into it if you haven't!
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.
The big difference is that when the web blew up, there were new players in every direction. Now, we get to hear from the same 3-4 companies over and over and over and over again.
It's not the same 3-4 companies. The 3-4 companies are Anthropic, OpenAI, X/Grok, and Meta/Muse.
But there's also DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Jev, and countless services built on top of frontier or open source models. Those 3-4 companies might have the most numerous announcements that hit the front page, but there's way more than that going on in all directions.
What am I supposed to comment "this is cool and I'm excited to try it!"? Snark is a contagion but they're on the front page because a lot of us are having a lot of fun using these new tools and playing with the new ideas
Given that anti-AI posts are flagged faster than I thought possible despite a lot of positive comments, there are probably a lot of silent viewers that are pro-AI…
Well, a couple of years before that it was all NFTs all the time. Then before that it was web3. Then before that it was the blockchain in general. And then before that it was Haskell and monads.
I don't think it lasted long. I remember finding it annoying as the whole concept of NFTs was eye rollingly stupid. At least some of the other topics have had merit.
I joined HN around the time category theory was starting to take off so not sure what the topic du jour was before that.
I hadn't since CmdrTaco left. But I've been going to it more and more in the last few months. I don't read the comments - but I do like the headline curation.
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.
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 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.
Makes sense though. The use case for these always-on assistants (Muse, Dot, Instinct) isn’t coding and complex technical projects but more benign stuff like email and appointments.
I need to see if my cursor subscription would let me use Grok Bot. They don't have the best models at the moment, but I'm really curious about the ergonomics of their approach. It's pretty different from the other labs and I could see it taking off for non-technical users.
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?
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.
If done correctly, the agent will only be able to request that passwords be filled, but the secrets will only be handled by the password manager and browser extension, which will be able to set some security boundaries and make checks on which domains are allowed.
If your issue is allowing agents to use your credentials and take actions on your behalf, then that is a separate question.
1Password has had vaults for a very long time now. You can also key API credentials specifically to a vault. I've been letting agents access _their own_ vault for awhile.
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.
I’ve been trying vanilla Codex with remote control running on a MacBook 24/7. Computer use enabled, browser with logged in sites. Giving it tasks from my phone.
It’s been nice overall, but Astra (or its harness?) isn’t particularly proactive and autonomous. You have to kick it in the butt for every step. Written it up here: https://ivan.berlin/notes/chatgpt-personal-assistant/
Any reason you're not using ChatGPT Dots which is also using Astra (and also unlimited free usage this month) and precisely designed to solve the proactive/autonomous issue? https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/
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.
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 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.
Apps can integrate into iMessage, there's an API. You're thinking of sending and receiving actual iMessage messages as a full user, which they can't do.
A notable distinction between Duet and Meta Muse/OpenAI Dots is the lack of quirky anthropomorphic branding. As a result, the use cases are more clear/more professionally-oriented as they don't rely on you creating a magic pet/BFF that does whatever you want.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I'm still wary, I hope to one day make use of them to offset my ADHD-like tendencies. Normally you'd have friends or family for that, but in my case a proactive bot would be a more readily available and reliable solution...
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.
Tbh, I still see labs demoing "reservations" or "email triaging" as the best use-cases. Definitely sure there are many niche ones too, but I'm still not sold on these.
My honest feedback is that opus and fable have been the worst of the current generation. All Anthropic does is gaslighting people saying their PhD level model needs well formatted instructions and people are doing it wrong
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.
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
This is an OpenAI Dots, Grok Bot and Muse competitor. All four of them including Claude Duet have two out of three requirements to survive in this product sector in the long run:
1) The compute to scale these agents to every user on their platform.
2) The models that power them for 'intelligence'.
3) Generating existing revenues elsewhere to keep it going.
Now there is just one "competitor" that I didn't mention that owns neither the compute, or a model of their own and does not have any revenue and it is somehow raised money and is worth billions.
After the release of Claude Duet, Dots, Grok Bot, and Muse, why would that company (Instinct) be worth billions and how does that not resemble another Clubhouse moment for them?
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.
I suspect that Dots and Duet are very high margin drivers for the labs. Personal assistant chat sessions don’t have to be realtime, so workloads can be scheduled on low priority batches and be waited if higher value work comes into a queue.
Inference providers are always trying to fill inference batches and having a stream of low priority requests can help pack batches that might have gone empty, without raising the latency of higher priority requests such as live chat sessions.
While Dot and Duet certainly need to be useful to work out as products, I think the gross margin mechanics are just as interesting.
Powered by Opus 5.5 is incredible.
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.
My first thought is that, before LLMs, getting out of your comfort zone to work with folks in Kyoto in their language would have been an important step in getting yourself ready to live there successfully. It would have been difficult and awkward, but that's part of the process. Or it was. I wish you luck once you get there.
I think maybe it is more like having access to services at one wealth level up.
People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.
That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.
Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"
Hahaha thankfully I'm spoiled in that my wife is Japanese :)
I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.
So the fault is not in our stars, but in me :)
Your use case sounds so not ordinary to me that it is wild to think about it.
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.
> all sorts of insane tasks that would have taken infinitely longer and been unbelievably painful on my own
Your use case here is beyond mine, but I have used custom tooling to handle contractor bid process workflows for projects at our home.
AI applied to products will allow people to not only consider but actively move on changes that did not seem reasonably possible before.
Wow what is the story there? Like why Japan? I’m sure you’re learning a ton through the process.
Or maybe he's not, because the AI is handling it all.
Haha thanks for asking! A couple reasons - first and foremost, Japan is just awesome lol. I have a personal connection that's prominent in the fact that my wife is Japanese, but beyond that, there's a confluence of universally applicable reasons why buying a house in Japan is kind of an insane proposition:
Homes are insanely cheap and get massively devalued over timeframes that would be mindboggling to Americans. In SF, I live in a literally 110 year old home that's clearly breaking down in multiple dimensions and yet just keeps inexorably appreciating year over year and is now worth something like $2.5 million for a 2200 sqft place.
In Kyoto, the top contender we're looking at is an 832 sqft unit that was build in the 80s and newly renovated in the past few years and is...9.8 million JPY, aka $62,000. Literally less than a year of rent in my SF place can buy the Kyoto home outright lol.
Incredibly conveniently located, 6 minutes walking from Ogura station, and a ~20-25 minute ride from there to the heart of Kyoto - one of the most beautiful and iconic cities in the world, and you can get an amazing home outright for $62k there?
The exchange rate from USD to JPY makes this especially compelling right now, being at a mind-boggling high for the USD that, adjusted for inflation, makes the exchange rate almost the best it's been in half a century.
My wife and I also happen to get free flights so it's super easy for us to take a direct flight every month from SFO-KIX, which is what we're planning to do - basically spending a ~week here every month.
Japan as it stands right now is hands down the clear pareto frontier in terms of cost and quality of life - no other developed country comes close in terms of just how insanely affordable it is (a nice sit down meal literally costs ~$5-10 a person, especially with insane lunch deals at izakayas and the like - I've eaten sit down soba/udon meals that are 500 yen each, or literally ~$3, tax and tip included), and I'd argue no other developed country also comes close in terms of how nice life is, period, not even adjusting for price. The crime rate is literally nonexistent, everything is wildly clean, the public transit is unrivaled, the food is some of the best in the world if not the actual best, the culture is also world class, the heritage the same, the fashion the same, etc etc - basically everything is just better about Japan lmao.
Highly recommend everyone look into it if you haven't!
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.
That's like if you were in the 90s/00s and you're complaining about having to hear about this "internet" thing all the time.
The big difference is that when the web blew up, there were new players in every direction. Now, we get to hear from the same 3-4 companies over and over and over and over again.
It doesn't remotely hit the same way.
It's not the same 3-4 companies. The 3-4 companies are Anthropic, OpenAI, X/Grok, and Meta/Muse.
But there's also DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, Jev, and countless services built on top of frontier or open source models. Those 3-4 companies might have the most numerous announcements that hit the front page, but there's way more than that going on in all directions.
Or in the stone age reading about this "wheel" thing online all the dang time. I bet cave-people just wanted to read about rust in the kernel
Except that there weren't HN or Slashdot yet. By 00s you'd have gotten used to it.
Phenomenon as old as time (on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353091
nice find
We had Slashdot in the late 90s.
The funny thing is the front page is 100% AI and all the comments on the posts are 100% anti-AI.
What am I supposed to comment "this is cool and I'm excited to try it!"? Snark is a contagion but they're on the front page because a lot of us are having a lot of fun using these new tools and playing with the new ideas
Given that anti-AI posts are flagged faster than I thought possible despite a lot of positive comments, there are probably a lot of silent viewers that are pro-AI…
Silent members? I would also guess conspiratively, employees and foubders that benefit from the current AI-hype status quo.
At least there's some measure of substance to some of the posts, unlike the blockchain and big-data hype trains of yore.
I am pro AI :p
Well, it is the biggest trend in tech right now.
Someday there will be other trends, but it's currently AI's turn.
It's like being a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
There are far more new opportunities after AI than before AI. Try to find the positive perspective.
Well, a couple of years before that it was all NFTs all the time. Then before that it was web3. Then before that it was the blockchain in general. And then before that it was Haskell and monads.
That's just how it goes.
I think I saw a lot of blockchain in HN, but I don’t remember seeing NFT that much
I don't think it lasted long. I remember finding it annoying as the whole concept of NFTs was eye rollingly stupid. At least some of the other topics have had merit.
I joined HN around the time category theory was starting to take off so not sure what the topic du jour was before that.
Sprinkled with "blazingly fast; written in Rust" each week for the last 10+ years
You're not wrong, but I never really got over the "Haskell and monads" phase of it.
You forgot about React.
There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.
> every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.
I agree, that HN has mostly lost its spirit and soul and feels more like a AI-announcement bot.
> Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it
I disagree, that the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity are for our common good. I think its the other way around.
The LLM filling is actually more interesting to me as the frontpage of HN had already gone far too mainstream for me.
This may explain why these days I actually rely on Slashdot more for tech news.
I'm surprised that's still around! I probably haven't been Slashdot for a decade or so.
I hadn't since CmdrTaco left. But I've been going to it more and more in the last few months. I don't read the comments - but I do like the headline curation.
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.
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?
there needs to be a hnews AI edition
I'm surprised hn doesn't have an extremely basic filtering system for this kind of thing.
People could vibecode one in a single prompt, if they really needed it. But what they really need is to yell at cloud.
so... majority of HN now? Perhaps we need a hnews non-AI edition haha
There you go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659647
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.
Yeah, it caught an AWS bill on a random account I had made earlier in the month that was pushing $50+. That's been about the most useful thing so far.
Makes sense though. The use case for these always-on assistants (Muse, Dot, Instinct) isn’t coding and complex technical projects but more benign stuff like email and appointments.
I don't favor X models much but Grok Bot has been worth every penny for me so far.
I need to see if my cursor subscription would let me use Grok Bot. They don't have the best models at the moment, but I'm really curious about the ergonomics of their approach. It's pretty different from the other labs and I could see it taking off for non-technical users.
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?
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.
If done correctly, the agent will only be able to request that passwords be filled, but the secrets will only be handled by the password manager and browser extension, which will be able to set some security boundaries and make checks on which domains are allowed.
If your issue is allowing agents to use your credentials and take actions on your behalf, then that is a separate question.
1Password has had vaults for a very long time now. You can also key API credentials specifically to a vault. I've been letting agents access _their own_ vault for awhile.
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.
Cant you do exactly this with the CLI?
Yeah I certainly wouldn't give it access to that tbh
better than .envs and plaintext, which was largely the case so far
I’ve been trying vanilla Codex with remote control running on a MacBook 24/7. Computer use enabled, browser with logged in sites. Giving it tasks from my phone.
It’s been nice overall, but Astra (or its harness?) isn’t particularly proactive and autonomous. You have to kick it in the butt for every step. Written it up here: https://ivan.berlin/notes/chatgpt-personal-assistant/
Looking forward to this new Duet thing!
Any reason you're not using ChatGPT Dots which is also using Astra (and also unlimited free usage this month) and precisely designed to solve the proactive/autonomous issue? https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/
These AI companies appear to be "shipping their org chart".
Shouldn't this just be native to Claude, not a separate app/UX, as well as using the latest model (not Opus)?
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.
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 feel like the link to be used here should be https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet instead.
I agree, this is what was under their X post -- I don't think I can change it anymore though sadly.
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.
It. Don’t anthropomorphize AI.
They don’t let things connect to iMessage because they don’t want spam bots.
Apps can integrate into iMessage, there's an API. You're thinking of sending and receiving actual iMessage messages as a full user, which they can't do.
same, the only reason why I haven't switched from instinct to dots is the surface being whatsapp
A notable distinction between Duet and Meta Muse/OpenAI Dots is the lack of quirky anthropomorphic branding. As a result, the use cases are more clear/more professionally-oriented as they don't rely on you creating a magic pet/BFF that does whatever you want.
What is Instinct's future when its core product is commoditized and provided near-free-of-charge by OpenAI, Meta, and now Anthropic?
Same as any other AI startup. Make a big enough splash and get acquired (or acquihired).
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.
You hear that? Sound of a few dozen venture backed companies dying instantly.
... from this, and not Muse, Grokbot, and Dot? This is Claude catching up in functionality, not something new.
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'm still not sure why I'd pick one where I'm locked into a specific model family
I'm guessing mostly because they subsidize a lot of the costs
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.
These will be what replaces employees. One day you update the model from opus 5.5 to x.5, and it can just do a full job.
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.
dot, bot, and duet, all announced in a month. you couldn't make up this level of industry lockstep. now all we need is google bit and microsoft ditty.
> dot, bot, and duet
And Meta Muse
These "always on" agents seem popular but I have yet to find a use case for one.
Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?
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?
Organizing photos. Compiling hockey schedules. Giving out my home address to strangers.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/meta-agent-muse-conc...
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.
While I'm still wary, I hope to one day make use of them to offset my ADHD-like tendencies. Normally you'd have friends or family for that, but in my case a proactive bot would be a more readily available and reliable solution...
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.
You've explained more of what it is, but not why it's useful.
Tbh, I still see labs demoing "reservations" or "email triaging" as the best use-cases. Definitely sure there are many niche ones too, but I'm still not sold on these.
The simplest use case is tuning out all the digital noise in your life and having them only surface the important stuff.
https://x.com/claudeai/status/2112984664256241837
A full 3 weeks behind on launching their own persistent agent. Anthropic is losing its touch.
And they never even launched a cash-burning video generation service either. Stupid Anthropic, what are they even doing?!
My honest feedback is that opus and fable have been the worst of the current generation. All Anthropic does is gaslighting people saying their PhD level model needs well formatted instructions and people are doing it wrong
I need this so bad ;-;
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.
Next week Google is dropping one too.
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
Hasn't Google Spark been doing this for a long while?
I found Argon subpar with any long context work sadly, not sure how that'd turn out
This is an OpenAI Dots, Grok Bot and Muse competitor. All four of them including Claude Duet have two out of three requirements to survive in this product sector in the long run:
Now there is just one "competitor" that I didn't mention that owns neither the compute, or a model of their own and does not have any revenue and it is somehow raised money and is worth billions.After the release of Claude Duet, Dots, Grok Bot, and Muse, why would that company (Instinct) be worth billions and how does that not resemble another Clubhouse moment for them?
You suck at running your own life.
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/
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.
I absolutely hate how tacked on and stupid these chat features feel.
Every UI is designed to remove context from the human so Claude/Agent has it all.