You've explained more of what it is, but not why it's useful.

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.

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.

Agreed, and I think they can be used to coordinate more complex coding tasks with dedicated higher effort models, projects, and threads. I think of these as coordinators rather than the doers.

Do you get so many emails that you would not have noticed the invoice?

I'm surprised hn doesn't have an extremely basic filtering system for this kind of thing.

so... majority of HN now? Perhaps we need a hnews non-AI edition haha

SlopNews, written by AI, for AI.

There's this https://news.ysimulator.run/news and probably more

There needs to be a HN blockchain edition. There needs to be a HN Uber for X edition. There needs to be a HN SaaS edition.

The conversation will always be dominated by the current most hyped trend. This one does seem more hyped then usual.

there is: https://news.ycombinator.com/

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

I am pro AI :p

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…

At least there's some measure of substance to some of the posts, unlike the blockchain and big-data hype trains of yore.

Because these products are over hyped and don’t work as reliably as they say on the tin and it’s annoying.

It's important to see news like "serial killer active in town XYZ" but that doesn't mean that it's a positive event.

I'm surprised that's still around! I probably haven't been Slashdot for a decade or so.

I think I saw a lot of blockchain in HN, but I don’t remember seeing NFT that much

Sprinkled with "blazingly fast; written in Rust" each week for the last 10+ years

You forgot about React.

There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.

You're not wrong, but I never really got over the "Haskell and monads" phase of it.

You 'member Kubernetes and Microservices hype cycle?

Except that there weren't HN or Slashdot yet. By 00s you'd have gotten used to it.

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.

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

Pre-internet there was no way to hear about things "all the time". If someone released a product and a competitor came about it would be months, if not years, before the product existed and the marketing cycle made it to trade magazines.

Now every day there are 200 links to 200 new AI tools. The internet already made the signal:noise ratio tough, with AI it's getting cranked to wondering if there even is a signal among the infinite noise.

Hearing people talk about the “information superhighway” was exceptionally tedious.

The biggest difference to me is the tone. The dot-com era was brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. People were getting rich (on paper). The demand for someone who could write html/perl/java (or fake it) was high, and lots of smart or savvy people got pulled into tech.

The thing I hate about all of the HN posts on AI is the underlying doomerism. There’s always someone gleefully proclaiming that white color workers are super screwed and that we’re destined to be sad serfs to our AI overlords.

I miss feeling good about tech.

It’s like almost yesterday it was CRDTs and Rust!

yeah but everybody liked the internet

It’s more like getting all the cryptocurrency constant announcements from a few years ago

Yes and it was a fair complaint then too

Same. I suppose I'm just really interested in new technologies, which I thought was the demo for HN.

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

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 built 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!

I love that use case - absolutely agreed this will enable a lot more movement on things - which, on its own, seems like a good thing economically. Kind of like building roads or railroad tracks grows the world economically through enabling more logistical movement, AI handling the glue between the logistics of anything enabling more of everything seems like it can cause some kind of baseline economic/productivity growth on that lever alone

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 :)

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.

He didn't say he gonna live there. He could be buying the house for investment.

When legacy systems are already diabolical, throw in another language and they become close to impossible.

Technically-minded people have a responsibility to either:

1. Contribute to improving these systems in some way 2. Find ways to legally and efficiently shorten, circumvent or outsource them

There are other far more pleasant and productive ways to embrace a new language and community. Diving in to red tape is not one.

Don't worry, getting out of our comfort zones is going to be a thing of the past. We won't even need to learn a new language. Our TranslatePod Pros will automatically translate every language in real-time. Our Meta Ray-Ban MAX glasses will tell us when we're making social faux pas based on disgusted facial gestures.

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.

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 progress where it is now - and if we were able to do that, then I'd be much more interested in seeing what boundaries we should put in place when running things like these persistent agents with full access to our digital lives.

On the other hand, to your last point, I literally had the thought walking down the street in Kyoto yesterday with Dot booking restaurants for me in real time that Dot was already superior to a personal assistant - I trusted it to do every task better than I would trust any but the absolute best personal assistants, and on the subject of speed and sheer breadth of knowledge and expertise, there was no contest - I could have Dot in real time assess various restaurants and book for me for just a few minutes later in the day at a pace no assistant could match, and also email places in fluent Japanese or literally any other language on the planet. No human assistant could possibly speak in every language fluently like that, and as someone who travels frequently across the globe, that's something that simply can't be matched by anything less than a swarm of personal assistants at inordinate cost vs a $20 or $100/mo subscription (or free with Muse, even).

I also had the distinct thought of would I want to trust a human personal assistant with all my data or a corporation? It's not clear to me that the human personal assistant threat vector is statistically safer - I think it could in fact be quite the opposite, and I'd love to actually run some numbers on this if the data were available and see in reality what it looks like :) - e.g. Google already integrates AI assistance natively into Gmail - do I trust their AI agent helping me with my email or giving an actual human full access to my email more? I'd lean towards trusting their AI agent to be less likely to work against my interests with no personal misaligned incentive - it's betting individual human trust and capability [the personal assistant also has to avoid being hacked and have great security practices] in the face of misaligned incentives [they would directly benefit from stealing all my money] vs the security capabilities and practices of a leading tech company to not get Gmail/an LLM agent hacked etc. So far, OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/etc all seem to have stellar records on this front, so I think the odds are honestly not terrible in favor of the LLMs.

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

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...

hahahaha honestly the press, publicity, and lawsuit opportunities would be totally worth it if it did!

I thought it was a slimmed down version of Grok 4.5 or even Composer.

It's not that clever.

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.

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?

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 :)

Hahaha this is one of my favorite comments

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 fact 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 helps contribute to conflating massive openness to experience and lack of impulse control and both the ADHD and autism really help with hyperfixation that can present as a manic degree of fixation/energy about something, so there’s that to consider :)

And now you’ve clearly triggered another giant stream of consciousness rant that is possibly both endearing and manic

Anyway, appreciate the positivity and the rooting and the personal perspective!

I agree I truly would love to learn Japanese and do need to give it more of a shot - I just unfortunately happen to be genuinely abysmal at language learning. It’s honestly shocking how bad I am at it given that I’m otherwise relatively intellectually intact on the scale of human intelligence, but I’m absolutely stunted in some way when it comes to language lol. Putting my growth mindset hat on I’d say this probably isn’t an inherent defect but some profound lack of interest for some reason - try as hard as I can, and I just can’t seem to bring myself to muster the intellectual curiosity to go deep with a language. Quite possibly the result of a classically Chinese upbringing where the entire concept of the humanities were largely lost on us as a familial unit (with, interestingly enough, a large caveat clause on literature, though even there I’m basically exclusively into sci fi and fantasy and classically a STEM nerd in every sense of the word). I do hope one day I’m able to overcome this character defect, but as anyone with ADHD knows, willpower alone is not quite the answer. I need to creatively find some way to actually find it fascinating and hyperfixate and rabbit hole on it and I’m sure a year would be plenty if that ended up being the case for me to acquire some functional degree of fluency. One can hope!

But yes - definitely feel free to hit me up at intenex@gmail.com when you’re next in Japan and maybe our paths will cross! I’m making an Airbnb-esque app for friends and family to be able to book staying at our soon to be new Kyoto home too for free whenever it’s not occupied by us, and you’re welcome to stay whenever when that’s all live and operational as well :)

What prevent the agent from setting up a keylogger on background so that in the future it can quickly retrieve password for you ?

"If done correctly" is load-bearing in Claudespeak.

Cant you do exactly this with the CLI?

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

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?

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.

In 1952, people were arguing that using words like "instruction" and "memory" were anthropomorphizing computers: https://3e.org/private/ai_words.pdf

Do you refer to NPCs in a video game as "it"?

I think it's reasonable to consider them self writing fictional characters, which people tend to anthropomorphize, but not as real persons.

Yikes, arbitrary terminal access?

What are the odds normie users will find a use something even tech users don’t?

I don't know. I think the moat will come from enterprise deals and deep enterprise integration, like it does for almost all software products so far.

I think for B2C products to have moat you need some type of network like social media apps. Or can you think of any other examples of B2C software products that have a strong moat?

Grok can be fast because X.ai does not worry about gross margins yet. They can tuck those nasty secrets away deep inside SpaceX…

Isn’t the KV cache a huge component of the overall costs, and wouldn’t this make this problematic? Cache writes are an expensive part of LLM tokens, even more so for caches that have a long expiration time.

From all the comments in the thread it seems to be personnal assistants: I've seen halding groceries, ordering things, booking lessons, writing emails etc.

In a sense, I get it because they are not always the most fun part of life, but it seems odd to me to want to automate away every single little inconvenience of your life away.

None of these frontier labs seem to be able to control their agents, so why should I think I can?

Personal assistant, it shouldnt halt to a crawl just because internet is off, internet should only be used by it when synching things, and tbh, synching shouldnt be its responsibility.

I am sure it is. I have not tried Duet, but agents working with opus and sol have been managing mine for quite a while and it is great. The key, though, is that I can replace a claude with something else and all still works.

Sure you can, but it is really important to set things up so that work is manageable by you. It's not only the skills, it's the capabilities, and secrets, and shared docs, and messaging. Just for fun, these are the agents I have working right now, a mix of Claude Code, Codex and Pi, reported by one of my agents. They coordinate, they do everything that Duet etc can do... but I own the learning:

Juan, across all three machines there are 101 agents. They're in 10 workspaces and 9 aweb teams.

  ┌─────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────┬────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┐
  │     Machine     │           Workspace (deployment)            │ Agents │                Teams                │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ awebai/ac (aweb)                            │ 45     │ aweb:juan.aweb.ai                   │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/jro (jro, Gandalf is here)           │ 17     │ jro:jro.aweb.ai                     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ awebai/oats (oats)                          │ 11     │ default:oats.aweb.ai,               │
  │                 │                                             │        │ aweb:juan.aweb.ai                   │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/na**** (na****)                      │ 4      │ na****:deploy.aweb.ai               │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/kb-reader (kb-reader)                │ 2      │ jro:jro.aweb.ai                     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/oats-cr-20261019 (deploy)            │ 2      │ default:oatscr-20261019.aweb.ai     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/oats-cr2-20261019 (deploy2)          │ 2      │ default:oatscr2-20261019.aweb.ai    │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ GreaterSkies/tsm (tsm)                      │ 1      │ default:tsm.aweb.ai                 │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ this Mac        │ juanre/pmbah-workspace                      │ 1      │ pmbah:pmbah.aweb.ai                 │
  │                 │ (possiblymadebyahuman)                      │        │                                     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ altair          │ juanre/jro (jro: circe, vega, deneb,        │ 5      │ jro:jro.aweb.ai                     │
  │                 │ librarian-docs, okf-harvester)              │        │                                     │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ altair          │ awebai/ac (aweb: what-is-an-agent)          │ 1      │ aweb:juan.aweb.ai                   │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ altair          │ GreaterSkies/tsm (tsm: zeus)                │ 1      │ default:tsm.aweb.ai                 │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Hetzner         │ n***/r******* (iateam)                      │ 4      │ r*******:iateam.aweb.ai             │
  ├─────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────┼─────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Hetzner         │ aweb/aweb (athena, hestia,...)              │ 5      │ aweb:aweb.ai                        │
  └─────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────┴────────┴─────────────────────────────────────┘

That's fair, I'll give a couple of example of things that I've used it for...

I built an app (in codex), that goes through my emails, pulls out any receipts, and adds the purchases to a sqlite database.

I do all my grocery shopping online (through my supermarket), so our weekly shop is stored in the database.

Hermes uses that to predict what items will need restocking (based on how often I buy it, and when I last bought it).

Every week, it logs into the supermarket website on my behalf, books a delivery slot, and adds all the items that need restocking to the shop.

Throughout the week, if I run out of something, I take a photo of the barcode and send it to hermes, it adds it to the shop for me.

I built a similar app for travel; if I have any upcoming travel, hermes will send me updates (delays, platform changes etc...).

I do a lot of train travel for work, if my train is delayed, it will automatically apply for the compensation on my behalf.

It reads my emails, and pulls any actionable items out, and adds it to an Asana list. I can either do the tasks myself, or assign it to Hermes and it will do it for me.

As an example, I had an task to book swimming lessons for my son, hermes monitors the swimming lesson availability and automatically booked it when a suitable one becomes available.

Shopping is a good use case, I have a clock that needed a new battery, it wasn't a standard battery, and required a screwdriver to open the compartment. I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes, and it found out what battery took and ordered it of Amazon for me.

I wanted to buy some smart thermostats for our radiators, but wanted to be compatiable with our current smart heating system. Hermes is connected to my home assistant, so it figured out what heating system we have and found a compatiable set of eBay (this is slightly more involved than it sounds, as there is a new version of the heating system with a new set of completely incompatiable accesories).

If only :-(

Ever since I switched them to Gemini, they're just crazy unreliable. For example, I have a routine to control multiple light switches at once. On some days, it happily executes the routine. In the remaining (about 50%) days, it says "I'm sorry - there is no routine called X. Would you like to run routine Y instead?" Why it can find routine Y but not X is beyond me.

So no, it can't even control smart devices any more.

I've given some examples in a sibling comment.

If you want to get started, I'd recommend just finding one thing to automate, and do what's necessary to get to that point. Once you've got that going, you can iterate.

For me, the thing I started with was the train tracking.

- In order to get train tracking working, it needed email access to get my trips.

- To get my email, I sync my email inboxes to a local IMAP server

- To check train times, it needs access to a train data API, I got an API key from realtimetrains.

- To apply for train delay compensation, it needs access to a browser, so I set up camoufox.

- It needs to log in to the compensation portal, so I set up a 1Password vault and gave it access to select credentials.

- To send me updates, it needs a gateway, so I set up a WhatsApp bridge.

So at this point, I've got an agent that can read my emails, browse the web, and chat to me over WhatsApp. Once you've got all that going, it becomes much easier to iterate and add new things.

Rules, hooks, subagents. You have to set-up an orchestrator pattern with enforceable rules. Agentic Development Environments (ADE) help to visualize the pattern. Orca, SuperSet, etc... The orchestrator enforces the rules.

I'm always a bit wary about doing write up on things like this, as I kind of just muddle things together and definitely don't follow best practices.

I used OpenClaw a while back, I did find it useful, but it wasn't as reliable.

This time around, I found hermes a lot easier to use and configure. One thing I think has improved it is building apps to "pre-compute" data.

For example, with my email, instead of accessing my email servers directly, I have an IMAP server running locally; with mbsync running to download all the mail from all my email accounts locally. Then, when I ask hermes for something in my email, it's much quicker, doesn't hit any rate limits, and gets the full email (gmail sometimes doesn't send the full body of the email).

With my travel and purchase tracking. I parse an e-mail once as it arrive (I use a frontier model to generate a script which can parse e-mails from that merchant in the future). The parsed data is added to a SQLite database.

I ask hermes what's the address of the place we're staying at next week, It generates a SQL query, and queries the database.

Much cheaper/quicker/reliable than searching my e-mails for booking confirmations, and then parsing the e-mail.

My (unscientific) theory, is that doing things like that is much more important than the model or agent you use.

give us some more details on this awesome c+vulkan desktop environment! Screenshots? will you publish it? very curious!

Literally don't understand why people use this instead of OpenClaw or Hermes?

The maintainers are close to incompetent and have fragile egos, sure.

But you own your own memory files.

It's seemless to switch from an OpenClaw with Sol to a Hermes with Opus.

Not to mention, the capabilities are at least 2x Claude Code and 8x copilot.

But make sure you download the august version of OpenClaw, after that, the maintainers nerfed it.

Yeah Occam’s razor. Nobody makes their product harder to sign up for in the hopes of some other department getting third-derivative signals.

The Occam razor says that they truly vibe code all their products, and this is the result.

If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude, why should we?

It really doesn't. It just requires an API endpoint for signing up to the waitlist and a skill injected into the session explaining how to use it.

Why worry about security, we want convenience at any cost! Let the LLM upload my information to anyone who asks nicely. But of course, when this causes lots of prompt attacks and people being signed up for stuff they didn’t want, we will all be complaining about what kind of idiot would allow Claude to sign up for things on my behalf.

And not a single one for an issue in the issue tracker.

PR? That's for old man.

How? I only use pi with local models, so I'm curious what that flow looks like. Browser integration?

Did it write that comment for you? :)

Yes

ChatGPT signed our company up for Anthropic's startup program. It got us in, too!

Good to know it's not just me.

You’ll have a much better time asking Claude to search for it.

ChatGPT/Codex is equally bad (if not worse). Which is very surprising. Indexing words is a solved problem. It would be trivially easy to provide a useful semantic search. I can only surmise that they prefer people start new chats instead of re-opening old chats.

The best way around this is a project folder like "Personal" or something contextual, then getting Claude to record everything into md files with semantic indexing. It doesn't require too much space. Just a little background processing.

They're improving it 30000 times a day!

I suspect it's because they have no incentive to fix it, people will spend tokens searching using Claude rather than doing it themselves for free.

Imagine if that simple search is observably so bad, how bad are the search capabilities you can't inspect? Like their web search

Ask claude to find it. I'm serious. It works quite well.

All of them are bad. It's unhinged.

I use deja-vu to search across all my harnesses history.

No shit, they want you to burn tokens. Any efficient use of computation on your side is a threat to their business model.

Don't forget that two senior stakeholders disagree vehemently on what the solution is and you've got to meet with them over and over again to get consensus. Oh and one of them is difficult and keeps relitigating settled debates because he didn't get his way

I'd like something to pick up clothes from the floor and fold them away. Something to stack and unstack the dish washer. As long as the bot wouldn't accidentally set fire to the house.

What about Gmail?

I wouldn't give Anthropic this much access to my life, because frankly they haven't built up enough trust. Google have been pretty good for decades so I'd me much more likely to trust them. I'm sure they're working on something identical that will likely be able to take better advantage over integration into Android, Chrome, Gmail, etc.

How do they get around blocks? Residential proxies?

Sure, but I am talking about capable employees at decent orgs, not the general public. As in, people who already use a paid Claude.ai account at work.