@rileybrownOct 27

My dream AI agent tool: - Opus 5.5 Level Model (never delegates to worse) - Spins up cloud and local code sessions - Dots level real time voice / tool use - Codex level Computer use on local sessions - Claude Artifacts quality decks, docs and design - Mobile app is UI of duet - Inline mini apps (What Grokbot is doing with email and slack, but do this with alot more tools) - Webhooks (Like Grokbot has) - Built in social media access across all platforms - Plugins (of course) In summary: I want an always on, frontier model powered employee that can use its own computer, and can use my computer 24/7 that self organizes all of its tasks into channels so that its easy to keep track of all the things we've done together. And I want to be able to control this agent on mobile, web, desktop, and most importantly real time voice.

@alexfinnOct 26

Ummm am I reading this correctly? OpenAI just released GPT 6.1 Terra, and it's passes Astra on some tests at 1/10th the price and 3x the speed What I find super interesting about this though is how they're marketing it: "sharper visual reasoning, precise computer use, technical drawings, drafting proposals, filling forms, editing videos" It's clear this model was built for personal agents in mind. OpenAI's first. It's obvious this will be plugged into Dots and it feels like the right model to use in Hermes agent Incredible at computer use, is lightening quick, and will cost you next to nothing I'm personally still leaning on Astra on fast settings for coding, but I'll be plugging this in for Hermes We are living in the most exciting times

@petergyangOct 25

This is what I like about Grok @Bot's mental model vs the alternatives. It's really easy to wrap my head around each bot being an employee with a specific job that I can onboard and make better over time. Meanwhile: 1. Dots: Everything happens in a single thread and gets really confusing 2. Muse/Duet: Side channels and chats help here but don't feel as personalized as an AI bot employee

@thsottiauxOct 24

Known affiliation

DM if you want to help scale dots to 1B users and have done similar things in the past

@rileybrownOct 23

My unfiltered thoughts on personal agents. Grokbot has the best UI and it’s arguably the best overall. In a lot of ways they’re ahead. Their desktop app feels the best, and their multi-bot coordination is great: you can set a team lead and it passes tasks to the other bots. Grokbot also has the best “webhook” feature, which means you can easily turn outside events into triggers that start your agents. That speeds up background workflows like watching your email, Slack and more. It also has Cursor integration, so for bigger tasks Grokbot can spin up a Cursor cloud session with any model (until OpenAI cuts SpaceX off from their models, which I think will happen soon). Unfortunately, running frontier models through Cursor costs more than Claude or Codex. Still, they’re the only ones embracing a team of agents. It’s a really cool idea, but the more bots you have, the more time you spend managing and maintaining them. I’m starting to think one bot with different threads/channels is the right answer, which I’ll get to with Claude Duet. dots by OpenAI is rough around the edges right now, but it’s probably the most powerful if you use Codex, which I do. dots can spin up Codex sessions in the cloud or locally on your computer. So if you have coding or video editing workflows that need your local files, this is very useful. Codex computer use is also the best in the world: your dot can spin up a local Codex session that fully controls your computer, as long as it’s on. Their real-time voice is incredible. If you have your email and work tools connected, try this: go on a walk with headphones in, ask the agent to summarize your emails, have it draft replies and read them back to you, then send them off. If I remember right, this is close to a workflow you (Tim) used to have with your VAs before AI. It’s my favorite use case for personal agents. The one downside is that you have to call your agent, and it’s an awful experience. It literally rings, and it’s annoying. Muse by Meta is a toy. I’ve talked to a bunch of finance people I play poker with who all tried it and set up automations, and they all said it doesn’t reliably do what they want. It’s fast, and its user numbers will probably keep growing. But it’s basically free: you get a TON of usage without paying a dime. That’s NOT a trade I’m willing to make. An agent doing high-leverage tasks should be running at the Opus 5.5 or GPT 6.1 Sol level. Claude Duet - is in early access, so unfortunately not everyone can use it yet. First things first, it runs on Opus 5.5, the best model in the world. I’ve only had access for 72 hours, but Duet feels different from the others. It’s not a personified agent like Grokbot, dot or Muse, which gives it a more professional vibe that I like. When you ask your Duet agent to do something, it spins up a task, which is a new chat thread. All your threads show up in a Tasks tab, so it’s easy to see everything Duet is working on or has finished. And instead of creating more agents (like Grokbot), you create channels, just like Slack (I can tell @anthropic is Slack-pilled). I have a content channel, a finances channel, etc., which keeps different kinds of tasks separate. The only other app I’ve seen do this is Buzz by @jack, and it’s a good experience. Their strong point is documents (artifacts). If you want decks, high-quality docs or design mockups, Opus just wins. Period. It’s not close right now. Their weak point is real-time voice. It’s the worst of the bunch and borderline unusable, though I think they only added it a few days ago. Instinct lives in iMessage, has no app, and doesn’t do anything notable besides show you product suggestions you didn’t ask for. (Not ads, according to their team.) My hot take: The VM is overrated. SpaceX, OpenAI and Meta all talk about the VM your agent can use and feature it in their marketing. It’s not as useful as you’d think, because more and more websites block bots that visit their site on the cloud VM. All of these companies promise their agents can make payments, but most payments either take forever or get blocked altogether. SpaceX has a cool workaround with Grokbot that routes traffic through your computer so it uses your IP address. But I’d much rather the agent just USE my computer for the task, like dot does by handing it off to Codex. Also, i don't think normal people care about the virtual computer. If anything they get offended they have to "stream a computer". The problem with personal agents: by the time you read this, pick one, and test it for 7 days, every one of them will have released 10 new features and the whole landscape will have changed. It’s nearly impossible to keep up.

@gergelyoroszOct 23

Got to give the Grok Bot team credit where it's due: they are shipping at lightning speed. Grok Bot is integrated into X, seamlessly, now. Also, they are the only major platform that launched in the EU: Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots not available, so for EU+UK, less competition

@caseynewtonOct 22

Claude Duet launching as a separate, mobile-only app makes it way less useful than OpenAI's Dots, which you can access from everywhere. Agents are for work, and the phone is an inferior work device

@aakashguptaOct 22

An AI just noticed that a job candidate's other offer expires at 6pm tonight, and no one asked it to look. That's from the demo for Claude Duet, the new app Anthropic announced today. It reads your email and calendar in the background and messages you in the morning with whatever actually needs you. Nicole, the business owner in the demo, wakes up to a brief with three things in it. There's a $640 health permit for her new Chicago location, that 6pm hiring deadline, and a $410K contract renewal her client just redlined. Now look at how each one ends. The permit is ready and just needs her OK. All three finalists already have interview slots today, with the invites ready to send. Claude even drafted a counter to the redline. It does all the grunt work and stops right before the decision, which is exactly what you'd want from a great assistant. The hard part is knowing what makes the list in the first place. To flag that 6pm deadline, it had to know Jenn was a finalist, find the competing offer sitting somewhere in an email thread, and understand that losing her means starting the search over. A new human assistant wouldn't catch that in their first week, because they don't know your life yet. That's why the line I'd pay the most attention to is tucked into Anthropic's thread. Duet pulls in the memory, skills and connected apps from your existing Claude account, so it starts on day one already knowing who Jenn is. Grok Bot, Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and Hark have all launched agents like this since August, and the race comes down to which one already knows the most about you. The Northfield item is sneakier than it looks, too. Net 60 means the client pays two months after you invoice them. If that $410K bills monthly, every extra 30 days of terms leaves about $34K of Nicole's cash sitting in someone else's bank account while she's trying to open Chicago. Plenty of owners would skim right past that redline. The background work eats into your usage limits, so power users will probably need Max. But the typical executive assistant in America makes $76,590 a year, and the cheapest plan Duet runs on is $20 a month.

@mtsliveOct 21

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Anthropic just announced Claude Duet, an app where Claude keeps working for you even after you step away. • It’s a proactive agent that comes to you with what needs attention, finishes tasks you hand it, and runs on its own cloud computer • Every morning it checks your email and calendar, flags what matters, and drafts replies for you to approve • Built on Opus 5.5, it connects to 6,000+ apps like Stripe, Notion, QuickBooks, and Ramp, and carries over your Claude memory and skills • It asks first before sending messages, paying, or signing anything • It’s a waitlist-only research preview for Pro and Max subscribers in the US @theojaffee: "It’s like Dots, it’s like Grok Bot. It’s like Muse, it’s like Instinct. It’s actually a little more than Instinct, I think. So it looks really exciting. Can’t wait to use it."

@omarsar0Oct 21

Anthropic just destroyed all proactive agent startups. That's what you'll see on your timeline. That couldn't be further from the truth. Personal agents, unlike other agent types, will exist in different flavors and personalities. It's nice that Claude Duet runs on Opus 5.5. Unlike other agent types, people will really think carefully about which personal agent to pick. Here, people think more carefully about trust, personality, intent understanding, continual learning, etc. The best personal agent is the one you can trust, not just the fastest one that gets the work done effectively. But I think people will use multiple personal agents for different types of tasks/work. I think we are about to see an explosion of vertical personal agents. Which one do I use? I am still testing a bunch of them (dots, Muse, and Grok Bot). But I have actually just built my own with Pi Durable. I like mine better because it is hyper-personalized to how I use personal agents.

@signulllOct 21

pretty much every major ai company now has a personal agent product except google: meta → muse anthropic → duet openai → dots spacex → bots slowly but surely the competition is shifting from who has the smartest model to who owns the persistent relationship with the user. this will be even more the case going forward. you're seeing this because we likely reached peak intelligence required to power most of the worlds workflows probably earlier this year if not late last year.

@alexfinnOct 21

The announcement we've been waiting for... Anthropic is about to drop their personal agent Duet (love the name) A direct competitor to Dots, Grok Bot, Hark, and Muse All powered by what I believe to be the best model on earth right now Opus 5.5 This is the one I'm anticipating the most. Claude more than any other AI has felt the BEST to talk to It feels truly human and collaborative This has been what's dearly missing from this new class of agent harnesses. None of them feel truly HUMAN I have no doubt this will be the warmest, most fun personal agent to use I truly believe this personal agent harness race is the most important race of them all. More important than the model race People are giving their personal agents access to EVERYTHING Their emails, calendars, text messages, finances, EVERYTHING This is unbelievably valuable data people are now willing to give away to any company that makes helpful assistants The winner of this harness race will have access to incredibly valuable data it can then use to train even better models Anthropic is officially coming for the crown

@rileybrownOct 21

The way I use agents (Oct 21) Currently My AI usage is split between codex and Claude Code, but I use them both differently than I did a month ago. The way i use codex is mostly through my dot. Every morning I call my dot and put my AirPods in and I walk have a conversation for about 45 minutes. I try and handle as much work stuff as I can during that conversation. I respond to emails, write instructions for my editors, and do any planning for the day. Small tasks my dot does it, longer tasks I ask it to spin up a codex session. I REALLY wish I didn’t have to dial and wait for my dot to answer @OpenAIDevs When I’m at my desk doing coding work, document creation, or video editing I use Claude code. But, I’m not using normal Claude code I’m using Claude Code projects. The same way dot is a codex coordinator, Claude projects is a Claude code coordinator. Both allow you to spin up cloud sessions and local sessions. If I need to use computer use I will ask dot to fire up a codex session on my MacBook (that is always on) to do a task. Codex computer use is in leave of its own. For coding work or editing work that requires my MacBook I’ll ask my claude projects. Right now I have many Claude Code Projects for… each project. Sometimes I wish it was a single coordinator that could manage and organize all my work… like the way I use dot. Both Claude and Codex have a grokbot skill for anything Twitter related. So if any task involve x, they will delegate to Grokbot which is very useful as a creator. But the fact that I can’t see which model is being used when keeps me from using Grokbot. I know I can have Grokbot delegate to cursor which can specify a model but cursor is very expensive when using frontier models compared to codex and Claude, so I don’t end up doing that.

@dexhorthyOct 20

holy shit my Dot agent did something useful today

@alliekmillerOct 20

I gave my Dot a $500 budget and 24 hours to plan an entire afternoon for me and a friend. I asked it to pick the friend, ping the friend, coordinate time, pick plans, book any tickets, grab any reservations, map out commutes, send event invites, etc. and told it my only two roles were: (1) data permissions and (2) showing up. Literally just got into a cab and let Dot take over my day. Results in thread.

@omarsar0Oct 20

Is harness engineering dead? Absolutely NOT! Like the "prompt engineering is dead" and "RAG is dead" claims, this is just another misinformed claim used for clicks and ragebaiting. Mostly, it stems from a few recently published papers with poor experimental setups that focus only on SWE on already benchmaxxed SWE benchmarks. If we are talking about SWE, of course a lot of the harness stuff is getting absorbed by the model. And that's great. Thanks to better approaches for co-evolving harnesses and models. But in reality, you still need a stable, minimal harness to get high-quality results reliably and affordably. The big issue I see is that we assume SWE won't evolve. It already has, and as a result, teams are finding they need specialized harnesses to improve code review, cybersecurity, and work in more complex environments (multi-agent systems, sandboxes, etc.). The harness isn't just about prompts; it's the scaffolding that makes AI models work in the real world, covering security, safety guardrails, authorization, coordination, memory, scalable and new infra, efficiency, costs, and more. If you have been in computer science for long, none of these stay fixed. So how can anyone claim the scaffold/harness isn't needed? And worse, how can anyone claim these AI models will know all that, much of it proprietary and custom to every problem and domain? It gets more complex when you apply agents beyond SWE; domain-specific harnesses are popping up everywhere. These require entirely new ways to optimize context, memory, guardrails, security, and more. To make my point even clearer, look at the new wave of proactive and personal agents (Muse, Grok Bot, dots, Instinct, etc.). They involve clever, complex harness engineering. I think we will see vertical personal agents too, so the harness will get even more specialized. I can go on and on. I'd love to hear what other serious builders here are seeing.

@kplikethebirdOct 19

I've been on the fence about personal agents, but with @every Thesis and my birthday coming up, plus a speaking commitment, plus a couple of moving-target deadlines for day to day publishing, I'm starting to lean on my dot Jo more and I'm starting to get it.

@omooretweetsOct 19

If I was a brand or retailer, AI discoverability / agentic commerce would be my top priority right now. And, there's an extremely easy and free way to get a sense of how you "show up" to agents. 👇 First, create a dummy account on all the agent platforms (Muse, Instinct, Dots, etc.) Sign up with a fresh email that does not have context on your real identity, or even use a VPN to "go" to where your average user is! Then, ask the agent to perform a search that you'd want your product / platform to show up in. As an example, I prompted: "find me a winter coat for SF." Watch the agent go through the evaluation process (you can literally view the browser), and at each stage ask it questions like: - How did you identify the initial set of options for this search? What were your sources? - Were there any failures / blocks you encountered that eliminated any options? - What were the exact variables that your ultimate ranking or recommendation was driven by? Follow the process all the way through to the point of purchase. You will very quickly start to get a sense of how an agent thinks, edge case issues it runs into, etc. As an example, during my winter coat search via Muse I learned the following: - Patagonia bot blocked my agent - so Muse then went to / recommended other retailers that carried the jacket to make my purchase - The agent first searched options from its training data, largely informed by Wirecutter-style roundups, Reddit, and enthusiast forums. Then, it looked at connected merchants via the Meta Catalog. Then, it did live browser searches. It dropped any websites with SEO spam or fake reviews - REI was the ultimate winner as it didn't throw up any bot challenges or traffic blocks, and my agent prioritized verifiable inventory and same-day pickup (which I didn't ask it to!). It found a discount on REI vs. the original retailer so prioritized that as well

@alliekmillerOct 16

With Instinct, my Google usage has dropped 90%. And before you all complain in the comments, if you leave the X sphere, you’d hear most people still use Google too. I continued to use traditional search for the last four years since ChatGPT came out, not as much but continued. Why? Tbh I found it annoying to open the Chat app when I could open any browser and just dictate to the url bar. App load had more lag than browser load. The answer took more time. I didn’t want/need everything stored in my Chat memory. And Google AI overview, after the rocks in pizza debacle, really improved. I’m in iMessage all the time. It’s on my computer and phone and faster than an app. And if Dots were on iMessage, I’d use that instead.

@kplikethebirdOct 15

This was a heck of a take to come across while procrastinating on an essay for the @every newsletter. It’s not news to me though, nor am I in fear for my job: we’ve been talking since at least Q1 about reinventing how our work reaches readers, and I don’t think Dan is prophesying the death of written communication the way half the replies seem to. That said, putting an agent between writer and reader *will* change how many people experience "content," and I think it's worth thinking about what that will look like. A few haphazard thoughts: 1. Writing for machines is nothing new. I got my start in content marketing, writing SEO pieces that had to please Google’s algorithm before a human ever saw them. We answered the query in the first sentence, minded our H2s and H3s, and engineered every paragraph to keep people on the page—which made the writing easy to find and usually flattened the life out of it. Writers will learn to make themselves legible to agents the same way. What none of us knows yet is what those agents will select for, and whether catering to them will flatten our prose all over again or actually reward depth. 2. Readers will split, the way they did over vinyl and print. Streaming killed the CD, and in theory the Kindle killed the print book, yet plenty of people still buy vinyl and want a paperback in their hands. Reading will fracture along the same lines: some people will want pure information filtered by an agent, others will find the whole idea distasteful, and most of us will toggle between the two. Writers will have to decide which reader they’re writing for—and get much more deliberate about what makes a piece worth reading in full. 3. A summary is not the same as an original piece of thinking If a full essay from one of my favorite writers lands in my agent every morning, that’s just a new delivery method, and I don’t lose anything. If what lands is an AI summary of what it thinks is salient to me, the machine’s reading replaces the writer’s work. Summaries always strip out the same layer first: what the experience felt like, which is the one part of writing a human can offer that a machine can’t. 4. What does it mean to surrender our choice over what we engage with? AI models are incentivized to keep us coming back, and we already know how eagerly they tell us what we want to hear. An agent that filters the world through a reader’s personal lens will default to serving up what already goes down easy—which means the piece that might have challenged someone may never make it past the gate. Writing exists to connect one human mind to another. Empathy is already in short supply; I worry about what happens to it when each of us gets a feed built for an audience of one.