YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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.

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?

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)?

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?

What is Instinct's future when its core product is commoditized and provided near-free-of-charge by OpenAI, Meta, and now Anthropic?

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 found Dots to be both worse than I expected and better. Worse in every way when asking it to do anything coding related (just kept running into issue after issue) but very nice as a "Monitor my communication channels for me" tool.

It's surfaced a few buried/filtered email messages that actually were important and I like having a second set of eyes watching incoming messages.

That said, for only that task, I could probably make my own tool I just haven't had the time to play with it.

Looking forward to checking out Duet once it launches as I prefer Anthropic models over OpenAI and that's where I already have a bigger subscription.

Whilst I appreciate the impact of AI and its long-term implications for humanity as we know it, I am getting kinda tired of seeing so many AI-related headlines here on HN. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel like every day the front page is filled with mostly LLM-related announcements.

Next week Google is dropping one too.

A full 3 weeks behind on launching their own persistent agent. Anthropic is losing its touch.

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.

I feel like the link to be used here should be https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet instead.

This thing apparently has an integration with 1Password. Am I hopelessly out of touch in this brave new AI world, or is giving an LLM access to your password manager the mother of all bad ideas?

I need this so bad ;-;

You hear that? Sound of a few dozen venture backed companies dying instantly.

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?

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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!

Are people really okay giving these agents access to all areas of their lives? And what do you even use it for?

I really have no interest in this if it's going to use my plan's regular limits. I have less control over the context window, if its going off task. I used dots and enjoyed it because I could supplement my codex usage with read heavy long horizon tasks like reading gh issues and making pr's. These PR's were typically pretty bad but gave some starting point. I have much better real world output with the Claude Code style human in the loop approach to task solving.

* Available in Pro and Max plans in the US