YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The first two sentences menthon anthropic so its this. https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet

Well the start the article saying they're not affiliated with Anthropic, and then talk about "Duet", saying "anthropic has done it again". They then list a handful of products they've tried, including "a host of other personal-assistant-type harnesses".

Is it not obvious that this is an Anthropic-made "personal-assistant-type harnesses"?

https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet

It’s an Anthropic product not yet released. I think.

https://duet.so/

Meh, I think it's fine for blog posts to assume familiarity like this if it reflects their niche. They're writing for the type of person who already knows what Duet is. It's not the NYT where there's a massive general audience.

In fact, the choice not to explain things tells me a lot about the shared knowledge of a niche when I'm looking in from the outside. I don't mind the extra digging to decode it and the implied familiarity gives me information about its importance.

I think it's more cron jobs, RESTful-type wait and react methods, and a harness that is calibrated to being a good assistant.

i.e. It saw I had an optometry-type appointment this morning and supplied some questions I might want to ask or consider.

It is just rsync after all right?

I’m on the same opinion. Why do I need to limit myself to something proprietary and in somebody else’s control when I can build and morph a tool to my needs.

The only reason I even look at frontier lab apps is for inspiration or shortcuts to my own implementation.

Using their apps feels like QA testing a trainwreck anyway with all of their UI/UX being an afterthought.

These kinds of replies always astound me. Like, I have a better use for my attention and token limit than building and fiddling with my custom agent harness?

I’ve hacked together my own version of this, basically a Swift app to manage secure access so I control the thing that has full disk access.

And then run a coding agent to manage calendar, emails, research projects against my work history, etc, with TouchID for the sensitive pieces.

It’s incredible, I hope to never put a flight on my calendar by hand again, and soon I won’t be buying them, either.

I started using Grok Bot a few days ago and I have seen zero screwups.

I don't know what I'd need a channel for, creating bots/personas seems more natural.

Adding credentials is essential, contrary to what the author of the article said. I gave it my library login and it can fetch newspapers for me instead of me clicking through the app every day.

When I had to provide a GitLab token, it nicely spawned a box for me to save the credential.

  - What did not work well -

Voice calls. The quick responses are often dumb while the proper model does the thinking, and in the middle of talking to me it would stop to do work or searches. It did not feel realtime.

Permission settings. There is a form where you can automatically allow actions you describe in natural language. I tried to allow it to run Claude on my computer or Send certain emails automatically, but the settings achieved nothing.

Coding. I wasn't able to make it use Claude, and its own work is worse than me using Opus 5.5 in Claude Code.

  - What worked well -

Planning flights, accessing newspapers from my online library, checking stock in online stores, sending regular summaries of events and weather to plan activities.

I don't trust Facebook or Zuckerberg, but I also don't really care about my own personal privacy from large corporations. I will use whatever is best/cheapest, generally. And I say this as someone who hates advertising and adtech.

Or GrokBot that isn’t an Elon employee.

That's because HN is an echo chamber. Plenty of tech people use and enjoy Muse/Instagram/Facebook, but the would be downvoted if they expressed it.

The killer feature is having the best model behind it. Not so easy to copy. Grok Bot tries to compete with a really good harness/infra and the team is doing a great job but having Grok as a model behind id is a huge disadvantage.

What do you mean copy? This is the copy, it's already behind Muse, Dots

Are you talking about self-organising maps or the sci-fi level capability we've seen in the last year?

In the article the author mentions that Duet doesn't seek any sort of credentials and mentions connecting repos, so I think that this assistant is being used more for managing coding work in a different way than managing life work. I do agree that to get to true "personal assistant" levels, like planning a whole trip for you, booking tickets, etc. you'd have to give pretty much full access to your identity and money, but people claiming it can do that probably are just handing it over, security issues aside.

Yeah, that's the core of the issue:

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

The "lethal trifecta": To be useful, an agent needs internet access, untrusted inputs, and your private information.

So it can get prompt injected and exfiltrate your data. (Indeed I read that Claude Code puts your email address into HTTP requests it makes to random servers?)

My solution here was to just not give it anything, but that does preclude the "my claw bought a car!" result everyone's excited about.