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.
giwook 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
5 minutes ago [-]
jghn 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
poilcn 4 minutes ago [-]
Sprinkled with "blazingly fast; written in Rust" each week for the last 10+ years
tonmoy 8 minutes ago [-]
I think I saw a lot of blockchain in HN, but I don’t remember seeing NFT that much
jghn 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
zhdc1 1 minutes ago [-]
You forgot about React.
There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.
paxy 14 minutes ago [-]
The funny thing is the front page is 100% AI and all the comments on the posts are 100% anti-AI.
frizlab 7 minutes ago [-]
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…
mhitza 2 minutes ago [-]
Silent members? I would also guess conspiratively, employees and foubders that benefit from the current AI-hype status quo.
jdross 11 minutes ago [-]
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
linuxftw 7 minutes ago [-]
At least there's some measure of substance to some of the posts, unlike the blockchain and big-data hype trains of yore.
sjdh76 10 minutes ago [-]
I am pro AI :p
Legend2440 11 minutes ago [-]
Well, it is the biggest trend in tech right now.
Someday there will be other trends, but it's currently AI's turn.
karmakaze 2 minutes ago [-]
The LLM filling is actually more interesting to me as the frontpage of HN had already gone far too mainstream for me.
smartmic 6 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
tomjen3 12 seconds ago [-]
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?
BeetleB 12 minutes ago [-]
This may explain why these days I actually rely on Slashdot more for tech news.
Insanity 11 minutes ago [-]
I'm surprised that's still around! I probably haven't been Slashdot for a decade or so.
plutomeetsyou 15 minutes ago [-]
there needs to be a hnews AI edition
binary0010 12 minutes ago [-]
I'm surprised hn doesn't have an extremely basic filtering system for this kind of thing.
kuberwastaken 11 minutes ago [-]
so... majority of HN now? Perhaps we need a hnews non-AI edition haha
HelloMcFly 9 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
intenex 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
monitron 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
bredren 8 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
saladdays 13 minutes ago [-]
Wow what is the story there? Like why Japan? I’m sure you’re learning a ton through the process.
justsocrateasin 4 minutes ago [-]
Or maybe he's not, because the AI is handling it all.
joshstrange 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
aliasxneo 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
paxy 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
t_gamer_kle 14 minutes ago [-]
I don't favor X models much but Grok Bot has been worth every penny for me so far.
roarcher 13 minutes ago [-]
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?
doctoboggan 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
aliasxneo 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
ciefa 12 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I certainly wouldn't give it access to that tbh
kuberwastaken 8 minutes ago [-]
better than .envs and plaintext, which was largely the case so far
aantix 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
MisterMunchkin 6 minutes ago [-]
They don’t let things connect to iMessage because they don’t want spam bots.
kuberwastaken 7 minutes ago [-]
same, the only reason why I haven't switched from instinct to dots is the surface being whatsapp
frizlab 5 minutes ago [-]
It. Don’t anthropomorphize AI.
doctoboggan 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
alberth 18 minutes ago [-]
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 models (not Opus)?
moecables 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
techpression 13 minutes ago [-]
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 agree, this is what was under their X post -- I don't think I can change it anymore though sadly.
danielklnstein 17 minutes ago [-]
What is Instinct's future when its core product is commoditized and provided near-free-of-charge by OpenAI, Meta, and now Anthropic?
paxy 9 minutes ago [-]
Same as any other AI startup. Make a big enough splash and get acquired (or acquihired).
bearjaws 12 minutes ago [-]
You hear that? Sound of a few dozen venture backed companies dying instantly.
LUmBULtERA 9 minutes ago [-]
... from this, and not Muse, Grokbot, and Dot? This is Claude catching up in functionality, not something new.
howunfortunate 11 minutes ago [-]
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?
devindotcom 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
csallen 1 minutes ago [-]
> dot, bot, and duet
And Meta Muse
ZeroCool2u 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
csallen 3 minutes ago [-]
> 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
LUmBULtERA 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
0gs 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
TheAtomic 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
charlesabarnes 20 minutes ago [-]
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?
paxy 7 minutes ago [-]
The simplest use case is tuning out all the digital noise in your life and having them only surface the important stuff.
kuberwastaken 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
Waterluvian 17 minutes ago [-]
Organizing photos. Compiling hockey schedules. Giving out my home address to strangers.
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.
dh2424 8 minutes ago [-]
You've explained more of what it is, but not why it's useful.
Anonyneko 17 minutes ago [-]
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...
lemonish97 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
paxy 15 minutes ago [-]
A full 3 weeks behind on launching their own persistent agent. Anthropic is losing its touch.
arcanemachiner 13 minutes ago [-]
And they never even launched a cash-burning video generation service either. Stupid Anthropic, what are they even doing?!
Now let's find a genuine use case for this. Outside of novelty and the made up "booking hotels / plain tickets" (things humans want to scrutinise over) I don't really see it.
ciefa 13 minutes ago [-]
I need this so bad ;-;
andrewstuart 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
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
kuberwastaken 13 minutes ago [-]
I found Argon subpar with any long context work sadly, not sure how that'd turn out
drusepth 11 minutes ago [-]
Hasn't Google Spark been doing this for a long while?
rvz 18 minutes ago [-]
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?
tamimio 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
fellowniusmonk 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
suhdonghwi 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
orsorna 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 19:43:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
Someday there will be other trends, but it's currently AI's turn.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shouldn't this just be native to Claude, not a separate app/UX, as well as using the latest models (not Opus)?
Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?
And Meta Muse
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
I got my dad instinct and he's maintaining websites with voice notes through whatsapp which is and insane UX comfort for him.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/meta-agent-muse-conc...
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/
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?
Every UI is designed to remove context from the human so Claude/Agent has it all.
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.