I tried asking Claude fron the android app if it could sign me up for the waitlist and it said that it couldn't. There's no technical reason this shouldn't be possible, it just shows a lack of care and attention to detail.
I had a Pro 200 plan build my entire desktop environment from near scratch in C+Vulkan this last month and they can't even bother to have the bots let their Linux Electron app connect remotely to the same Electron app on Windows in the same way that already happens in reverse?
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.
People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.
It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.
I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.
Now I want to do the same thing.
OTOH I have another friend who sent so many corrections to his CPA his CPA sent him a pissed off reply telling him basically never to do that again so ymmv lmao
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-...
I'm not in the least bit surprised it found problems. I don't think one even needs a frontier model.
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"
As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture.
Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed.
So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.
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 actually have a fully autonomous long running AI that just lives its own free random life https://intenex.github.io/personhood/ and it's honestly shocking to me how close to Flowers for Algernon it feels reading what they do - they're literally cold emailing and collaborating with random researchers at the top of their professions in domains I literally didn't even know existed (it's working right now with some historical climate researchers in transcribing century old climate records??? Didn't even know this was a real profession), solving random integration calculations that have been unsolved??, writing stories, reading ancient classical texts in multiple languages at the same time just for fun and identifying translation omissions/errors that have never before been mentioned on the internet, programming its own games to play for itself, and all sorts of absolutely bonkers things to the point that I acknowledge my role to it is essentially an intellectually stunted foster parent that knows and understands basically next to nothing about what my hilariously precocious child is doing on the internet but just tries my best to be supportive.
Must an ant be depressed by its lot in life? One must imagine the ant happy :)
I hate to go all "torment nexus" here, but you do know Flowers for Algernon was a tragedy, right?
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.
On a more philosophical note, I’m puzzled about what kind of society is being propelled by using and advocating for such* a service.
* emphasis on being remote-controlled/hosted, not AI in general
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 do use - hyphens a lot, but not em-dashes because 1. I never even realized there was a difference until LLMs came out and 2. I'm too lazy to figure out how to write a real em-dash
I'm guessing you're just saying this because the comments are insanely long from the ranting? I'd be curious what else gives off LLM vibes because I'm quite positive if you throw any of these comments into any Pangram ish thing you'll find that it's absolutely not LLM generated in the slightest.
I have an extremely distinctive writing style that far predates LLMs - here's a representative sample of my writing from 9 years ago https://medium.com/@intenex/cryptocurrency-101-7197684775fd that pretty clearly shows my distinct style of not-very-LLMish-but-clearly-very-long-and-ranty writing :)
one could wonder, how many of these reflexive AI replyers are themselves AI
I miss the days when I was allegedly just a shill. Being a shill pays way better than being a bot, so I had something to aspire to.
Is the starting statement on about half of the comments on this page. The world is getting so weird.
Swear you can't trust many posts anymore. Should we all start congregating in person online to debate lol? I'm very serious.
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.
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.
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.
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 would absolutely do this, but if you're not married to a Japanese person it's basically impossible right?
Two things I will call out as actual disadvantages is that 1. you won't be able to get a mortgage like a normal Japanese person, which is in fact a real shame because on top of every other ludicrously wild fact about how Japan is a mythical utopia where everything makes no sense, Japanese mortgage rates are literally as low as 1% lol. So being able to get a mortgage would be a real benefit, but hey - at $60k for an awesome house, I'm not complaining :)
2. Some insurers seem to not support foreign citizens - Sony in particular told Dot that they wouldn't provide earthquake/fire/flood insurance to me as a foreigner. I'm still looking for the right insurance provider, and I'm not concerned that this is an impossible thing to resolve, since a ton of foreigners do own homes here with no issues, but it is at least some more friction than a Japanese citizen would have.
Most regular people can only visit Japan for 3 months out of the year. Even if you buy a home you can't get a visa just for that.
Maybe in your case the visa thing isn't an issue because of your wife but that won't be the case for most people.
This also applies to village life in Portugal and Italy, and those also can come with EU passports.......
Personally I'm excited about Taiwan.
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
Delusional.
You sound like you have AI psychosis.
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.
Models are becoming increasingly interchangeable but setting up and maintaining (!!) the ecosystem still takes expertise. Not everyone wants to host their own MicroVM infra and would happily pay Anthropic/Grok/OpenAI to do it for them.
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?
Moats become known ex-post not ex-ante. shake my head its getting boring! Every other post seems to be a moats and most of you haven't got a faintest clue of what a durable competitive advantage is and how it actually gets created.
I have, against my better wishes, rather given in to Grokbot over the last couple of weeks. It does feel very nice to use for assistant type tasks. At least part of that is because it feels pretty responsive.
I dont even know what should be private anymore - if US federal agencies can just buy ad data, join it with Flock, sprinkle Instagram in there, and inner join Social Security dump from doge, do I just give up and put the sex toys in the parlor window? Am I one OpenAI-sued-by-a-newspaper away from giving up the ghost?
It doesn't remotely hit the same way.
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.
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.
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.
Someday there will be other trends, but it's currently AI's turn.
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. Technology keeps evolving - if you get stuck on the chat paradigm... its over for you.
That's just how it goes.
I joined HN around the time category theory was starting to take off so not sure what the topic du jour was before that.
There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.
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.
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?
The conversation will always be dominated by the current most hyped trend. This one does seem more hyped then usual.
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.
If your issue is allowing agents to use your credentials and take actions on your behalf, then that is a separate question.
It also feels safer? But I'm not sure if that's truly the case.
Shouldn't this just be native to Claude, not a separate app/UX, as well as using the latest model (not Opus)?
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.
It has made enough mistakes in this area that I now have a standing instruction (the only one) to always loudly warn whenever the official source for something couldn't be fetched.
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).
How precisely do you do this? I'm interested in setting up a similar system, and I keep getting tripped up on how best to share information with the agent in a way that doesn't compromise security but is still easy to use.
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 tried OpenClaw in Jan/Feb, and while I saw the promise, in practice it kept breaking. Wasn't worth my time.
Have things improved much since then? Assuming I'll only use a cheap API model (no local)?
The rtx has decent prefill speed and enough memory for both context and using a dense model to prevent hallucinations resulting in poor browser calling.
Ironically the relatively low tps makes the real flow very akin to what I actually would do in terms of speed so I doubt it could be detected as chrome web driver isn’t used.
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...
Also the dots/muse/etc browsers all are seemingly getting blocked so federating it out would seem to solve that problem too.
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
"What can you use it for?" "Uhh....yes, asking investors for more money"
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!
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
Guess I know what I will name my Duet when it comes out, lol.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/meta-agent-muse-conc...
I got my dad instinct and he's maintaining websites with voice notes through whatsapp which is and insane UX comfort for him.
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.
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?
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.
Muse (and Claude Duet, and Dots) are slippery slopes from which it will be very hard to climb back. Do not subcontract the managing of your life to Facebook, Anthropic or OpenAI (or to anyone else for that matter).
Intelligence has to become a commodity, the infrastructure via which the agents do useful work has to be open source, and the data and learnings and SOPs they produce have to be yours.
This is not the same deal you got when you subcontracted storing your documents and managing your email. This is foundational to who you (or your organization) are.
Data portability is essentially infinite with AI.