Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful | Hacker News Reader

Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful

fig.blue

126 pointsnathanfig142 comments

Am I missing something, how is there any sort value in these assistants acting as agents on your behalf when they are basically a black box? Like if it can't use my drivers license or my phone number or my credit card, it can't do 75% of things people claim it can do without being massive security issues. What am I missing?

For the record I use OpenClaw but it has its own services (gmail address, phone number, etc.) and I don't give it any of mine, which inherently limits its capabilities.

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.

Yes, I think Anthropic has traditionally done a good job of appealing to engineers, and that might be why this hits the mark for me: It makes managing my projects easier without trying to take over my personal life.

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.

My way of thinking here is "blast radius". Assume it will get prompt injected. What goes wrong? Then design the setup so that scenario is not bad. e.g. it has my keys but they've got $5 of credit on them. It has access to the filesystem, but only on its own Linux account. (Ok I set this up last year before they could communicate thru the bloody CPU cache, might need an update :)

From what I've read Claude Duet will not purchase anything without manual approval.

Right, so we can distinguish between "model did an oopsie" and "model was actually hijacked".

The former seems to be a much bigger problem. I've seen lots of reports of "Claude/codex bypassed security / stole API keys to complete a task", where that was the "intended" behavior — at least from the LLM's POV, trained to persist and complete user's task at all costs.*

I've actually seen zero reports of actual hijacking due to prompt injection, though they must be out there too.

---

* See also the recent thing about how every model was willing to do fraud to get a refund:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50140462

More often than not these sorts of stories are "I ignored all of Claude's warnings and told it YOLO and I'm totally surprised my production database was deleted!"

They support payments through Shop and Link. I don't know about the former, but Link requires that you do a separate approval for purchases. The Duet cannot just take a card and do what it wants.

Sure. And I told Claude Code the other week to commit, merge and push some code.

It said "Done, you can open the local dev instance and see the changes".

I could not.

So I asked it. "Well, no, you're not able to see those changes because they're not on that branch or committed."

"But I told you to do that and you said you had."

Claude's verbatim reply?

"You're right. You asked me to do that and I said I would, then told you I had done it, but I had not. Would you like me to do it now, then?"

The problem is how do you define a "purchase"?

The agent crawls some websites and reads some stuff and pushes some buttons. It's my limited understanding that you have

1. Hard limits like "file system permissions" (* never mind it going around for sake of this conversation)

3. On other hand of spectrum, fundamentally soft limits like a prompt "and ask me before you purchase "

2. And then in the middle you have harness enforced limits like "it won't do X with approval"... Those are being sold as hard limits but frequently they have classifiers and heuristics that essentially try to figure out which button on some third party website constitutes a "purchase" and triggers the harness limit.

Bottom line - I don't think such limits are as 100% fool proof as they are advertised / interpreted.

Very happy to be explained wrong :).

Don’t use LLMs to enforce invariants.

I've recently talked to people at Anthropic who are very confident that they have effectively solved the prompt injection risks that cause lethal trifecta attacks with their latest models.

The open challenge is how to prove it!

Somehow this does not fill me with confidence. I think I will keep paying my bills manually, thanks but no thanks.

Or, you know, automatically, with plain old software. Which works fine and fails in less ridiculous ways.

They can’t solve the model being a complete idiot though.

Or the user being an idiot. Saying this somewhat sarcastically, but there’s always someone who says “Go buy me a Rolex and have it shipped to my house” and then didn’t realize that could be $25,000

Isn't prompt injection just one facet of the trifecta? Like, I just don't know how it's remotely possible to have a non-deterministic block box ever deterministically know whether your credit card has been compromised or not. Even if you were hacked, how would you even know?

I thought the trifecta required all three not just pick two?

I’ll believe them when they put the lethal trifecta with their own skin in the game

Like the guy who put his SSN on the side of a truck and asked people to steal his identity?

I like it!

IIRC he had his identity stolen a bunch.

----

> In 2005, Davis and Robert Maynard Jr. cofounded LifeLock,[10] a personal fraud protection company.[11] Davis was CEO of LifeLock since its founding. As part of a marketing campaign to promote his company's credit monitoring services, Davis posted his own social security number[12] on billboards and commercials. As a result, he was a victim of at least 13 cases of identity theft between 2007 and 2008, belying LifeLock's claims that its services protect consumers against identity theft and fraud.[13] The Federal Trade Commission imposed a $12 million penalty on the company for deceptive advertising, likening Davis and LifeLock marketers to "con artists."[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Davis_(businessman)

oh, it's very easy to prove; just let the models and agents do the IPO for them.

What does this have to do with prompt injection?

heh.

I was downvoted on the suggestion that trivial prompt injection attempts are mostly solved.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50162483

> The open challenge is how to prove it!

It could be proven by Anthropic backed credit cards with terms that protect users if it’s leaked or an agent misuses it.

And we have to be honest: both agents will misuse users and the other way around. So you are asking Anthropic for a backing that will also get stress test by meatspace. I do like the idea: a prepaid or restricted amount credit card for agentic purposes, with the novelty being that amounts above threshold have some kind of protection within consumer law.

LLMs regularly confuse my messages with their own. They'll say "you said xyz" when it was actually them. I heard the same principle can be used to bypass security restrictions, so maybe it's still an issue. (Or do they only get confused about authorship when security isn't at stake?)

I have literally never seen this and it doesn't make much since because the turns are flagged with metadata. It should be impossible for Claude to confuse your text for its own. I know because I use this metadata all the time. I've built hooks and processes against it.

Contexts get compacted, texts get copy-pasted, tasks get transferred between agents, humans assume ownership of LLM generated content without reading it, etc. etc.

Yes all user error and avoidable using good processes but I have not seen any organization care about this so far. The carelessness of AI adoption is crazy. People are not aware of the risks.

> Ok I set this up last year before they could communicate thru the bloody CPU cache

WHAT!? [1]

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

FWIW, my biggest use case for agents like this is ongoing research. I.e.: check Humble Bundle weekly and tell me if there’s a book bundle I might be interested in. Has the Music Box announced a film series I might want to visit Chicago for? That sort of thing; I want filters for the firehose.

I like this and makes me think of making your own content algorithm profiles for the firehose. Let your agents scour the net for the things you already like, across platforms.

Isn’t this just a scheduled prompt? That’s already a feature. We’re reinventing the cron job.

The AI-cron job.

I use Claude for this stuff all the time. The difference is I have Claude create repeatable scripts which do the actual things on a schedule. Claude is never invoked in on a schedule, only by me. One example is job board search filtered for roles I'd be interested in. The script itself includes all the things I care about like being remote. Clear salary ranges. Type of work I want to be doing. Claude built a good script to scrape multiple sources and aggregate them into a sqlite database. It filters these out until a number of relevant roles (or amount of time has passed) that the script sends me a message and adds a reminder to my Apple account to check in on new job listings. At that point I'll invoke Claude myself to summarize and prioritize the listings. If there are gaps in what Claude finds vs the script, that's a point where I iterate again on the script. My goal is for the job alerts and filtering to be fully useful even if Claude and all LLM tools disappear tomorrow. And also not give such powerful tools the ability to run on a schedule on vague instructions.

Not really. I’ve got an RSS feed generator that I wrote to give Humble Bundle an RSS feed and it’s useful, but it doesn’t do any legwork for me. It doesn’t go out and search the Web for relevant reviews and send me a summary. It can’t serve as a preliminary attention filter and detect D&D bundles and screen those out.

The Internet firehose is vast. Tools that can help me filter it are valuable. Tools that filter poorly, of course, are bad, so I’m wary… but that’s still my potential use case.

I get a lot of value out of my Hermes setup, but it does not have my banking, or private data beyond GitHub projects that are shared with it. It has its own email and GitHub account, and access to drive Codex, Claude Code or Cursor. I treat it as an assistant via Slack.

It does research on products or real estate that I am interested in, it builds apps and other software projects for me, and does structured research on any topic. Information comes back to me via Slack, GitHub PRs, or websites/services served on the Mac that Hermes runs on.

Using an agent from Slack also adds a killer feature: multi-player contexts. I can work on changes with other human collaboators right in the same thread.

this is your brain on ai twitter :)

It’s a good sneer but in a few years this would be normal and you’d forget that you were sneering at this. I saw this happening when people said they used AI for coding in 2024.

so is it normalized for people to sneer at folks who happen to be ahead of the curve now?

so advanced. What did you achieve since 2024 bro. Still working the same job.

Yes but my relation to work has changed significantly. I haven’t written any code myself.

You’d have probably sneered at the suggestion that this would be possible in 2024. You’d be wrong then and you’d be wrong again now.

lol ok so achieved nothing with all the aiintelligence available to you.

Does it work with Claude's 1Password connector? https://1password.com/blog/1password-for-claude

Maybe a hot take, but I think you'd be insane to give Claude access to your 1password vault

As agents take over more of our work, holding the keys might be the last job for humans

Perhaps services could permit buying things with special AI credit card numbers that link to a special account that the user needs to manually approve by some period of time or else the order is canceled? Works differently though than normal payments where they can just ship the product or deliver the service based on receiving the credit card number.

Could call this “reserving” perhaps rather than purchasing, or maybe the purchase would be auto confirmed if under a certain dollar amount or combination of amount and waiting period.

Vendors could provide terms by API, MCP, or just in writing on the page where agents could read it, how quickly a confirmation is needed or what the terms of the reservation or purchase are.

I'm on your side wrt sensitive data, but there are other use cases. I use the OpenAI one: Dot, and this is why I've found it valuable:

- it uses a very fast model for normal responses, but also does reasoning and all the agent things. It responds within a second or two. - it feels like it has multiple threads internally- it can respond to your messages and questions immediately, but also do thinking and web search like a normal thread. - it can communicate with other agent threads, as an orchestrator (although this isn't unique to it). - it has dedicated persistent compute already, with a desktop that you control, and so gives you a UI surface area that the agent can use.

And so the value for me is an always-on agent conversation, where you can tell it to perform tasks and ask it questions, and it just does all of it immediately. Those tasks can be software development instead of like ordering dinner.

It has SMS / phone comm channels also, but I don't use that.

I have to agree. I've been using it for a few days now after coming from GrokBot, then Muse, then Dots. None really clicked for me within the first day. Duet seems different. I haven't quite pegged it, but off the top of my hand:

1. Yes, channels really are useful

2. It does seem to be using Opus 5.5 behind the scenes because, shockingly, it's not screwing everything up like the others usually did

3. Agree that the answers are short and to the point. If you want more info, you just pop open whatever task (separate from channels) it started and you can see what it's doing.

Seems like more time in the oven might have paid off here.

Also, to be clear, this is purely used as a personal assistant by me. I still use omp+Paseo for all of my day to day work. I find the separation of concerns kind of nice.

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.

Would you mind fleshing this out a bit? I'm not following how it identifies the sensitive pieces without sending to a model, or do you mean letting the model see messages, calendar, email, etc. but not able to go beyond those?

It’s similar to MCP, where in the Swift app I’ve got a catalog of actions eg, SearchEmail, AddToCalendar. I’ve got them bucketed by sensitivity so I have to approve (some of) them with TouchID.

So the model can see the results, but the access is whitelisted and temporary.

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 gave it access to a box on my network and it spins up agents in herdr with whatever prompts I give it. Works really well with any agent you tell it to use.

Over the weekend I decided to try Lauren Tan’s pstack via her Dr Eggbot and had it built a bot that would run a build for me for a few days. It was a complex enough prompt that it triggered something to let me tell it which models to use and ended up settling on Opus 5.5 for planning and review with Grok 4.7 for the actual coding.

Ran for the weekend and completed 5 phases of a project with about 15 PRs. Reviews caught several things and sent them back premerge.

I enjoyed a fun weekend with my daughter clearing Escape Rooms in Colorado. Came back to a completed project.

It was great.

Interesting. The Grok Bot computer connects to your box via SSH and using herdr it can work well with Claude Code and Codex there?

It can do that too, but you can tell it that it’s allowed to access specific computers it’s installed on. I allow it on a couple of computers on my network and from there it can SSH elsewhere.

It can send all bot traffic through those computers too so it’s less likely to get blocked.

I’m excited to try this. I got Instinct after hearing all the hype and it is basically completely useless. Fails at the most basic browser navigation type tasks.

Right now the consumer agent players are trying to pretend they have decent functionality that will exist 3-6 months so they can get marketshare. So hopefully Anthropic is sticking to their underpromise and over deliver.

I dunno, Hermes has been real hard to beat lately.

Well, I guess this is the point I start getting left behind.

There was a really good line I heard recently about how a lot of the hype comes from people who have has assistants as staff in life previously, whereas most of the population has never been in that position. So don't worry if it's not at all obvious how to benefit from this for the near future (I also have near 0 interest of delegating my personal matters)

It's obvious how to benefit, but it's a convenience I don't think is worth the cost. Hermes and OpenClaw are janky as hell, and handing Dario, Zuck, Musk, or Sama access to everything I do in life is a bridge too far.

"I have nothing to hide" is a poor reason to abdicate one's right to privacy. Especially considering how arbitrary and capricious Anthropic is about enforcing Dario's model of ethics and morality.

Agreed. I cannot see any value in using one of these agents this way, despite how useful the models are for other more guided tasks like software development.

Especially as the convenience in this case seems quite minor even ignoring the incredibly steep cost, particularly as I do not trust any of the companies offering these services to accept proper responsibility and accountability for failures, even ignoring the privacy issues.

In my view, the current "value" is driven by the current artificial scarcity of quality web search results.

For now with not all agents controlled by advertising engines, and not all content yet designed to honeypot them, today's agents make good headway bush-whacking their way to finding the right information on which to base task work for you.

If the first page of SERPs for anything, and the extra time needed to suss out quality information to inform your work or task doesn't bother you, then this benefit isn't one you'll value.

Put another way:

Today's agents help "cut through" the same maze of value extraction that Silicon Valley (where market share means find a way to tell users your thing is "free"), adtech, and the content-as-ad-scaffolding industry have built over the past three decades. Why waste time wading through all that when your time is better spent building more of it? :-)

that $2tn valuation started making more sense when i realized selling ad-space in LLM output is inevitable.

It's finally happening. It's almost a relief.

I was feeling that way prior to Duet. Like I said in another comment, what makes Duet useful to me is that it provides project management I've been missing without trying to take over my personal life. I need a project management assistant not someone who pretends to be me on the phone.

that's a good use case. though, i think i'd be more inclined vibe code up my own rig rather than use Duet.

I was thinking this morning about how shitty everything is about to become once "pretend[ing] to be me on the phone" is commoditized and widely adopted. good luck talking to people.

Sounds like Duet is more like Grokbot than Muse? Haven't used it but the author is talking about channels, github policy access for specific channels, etc. That doesn't sound like the Muse use case.

I actually use Claude's agents on the Claude platform for all things work related and it works pretty well. It's not cheap though if you use the more expensive models and setting it up requires currently some initial effort for connecting integrations like Slack the average user is unlikely to do. It also doesn't let you change things. Every change requires a new deployment. As a cloud agent that runs on a schedule it's pretty good. I think they just need to figure out a single place for this. Currently you can set up agents on the claude platform, as part of claude code, and as part of regular claude.

You might be right- Duet feels more like a project management assistant than a personal assistant, so perhaps not the right comparison.

Current flavor of the week variant of OpenClaw "feels useful". Now that's an endorsement.

I did try OpenClaw myself when it came out. But I felt like there was nothing really new there over what we had been building for the previous years; just consumer adoption happening. Definitely feels like this new wave of products (Muse, Duet, Dots, etc) is onto something. I have been them daily, feel like they are incredibly useful, and have clients ask to build something like this for them (they never asked for OpenClaw'esque products).

I disagree on the voice interaction point. I DO want voice modes to be glorified STT-TTS.

The OpenAI AVM is uncanny and over-eager to me. You can run Anthropic voice on Opus since a handful days and it's incredibly snappy without feeling weird.

Agreed. I don't want the extra bits that try to mimick humans.

Sometimes it's as though they added background noise to make it sound like it's looking for things. Or even the long "hmmm, let me cheeeckkkk...".

Also, I think I'm ready to be able to choose from a robotic voice.

Just got access today. I like the channels, but I'm actually finding a few things frustrating compared to Dots: no phone calls (convenient to braindump and have it clean up later) and I don't have shell access to its underlying VM like with Dots. It's also weirdly hard / impossible to spawn Claude Code for Web workers and I can't connect the agent to a desktop and have it spawn jobs there. It doesn't seem all that faster than Dots.

It's early and obviously they'll keep iterating. It definitely feels less "make it yours" than Dots and that does feel intentional.

The lack of a true voice mode is curious at this point: ChatGPT has had it for a long time, I'm curious what the product managers at Anthropic are thinking here.

But I'm surprised you have trouble spinning up coding sessions: I have delegated that down from the top channel without any problems. Maybe you mean that you would like them to show up in the Claude Code UI? Today I can go to main channel and say "We need x and project y" and it delegates that down to a subthread in #y that soon has a PR ready. It's doing all of that in code sandboxes, and I have some of the usual settings for adjusting sandbox network access (though noticeably fewer knobs than CC environments).

Yeah sure. Let's talk again in 3 months once a new paradigm has been invented to further abstract and alienate us from the work we are doing.

That is the trend for sure. Duet is where I go from an agent manager to a manager of agent managers, and I have mixed feelings about that.

It's a shame that it's not yet available outside the U.S. I'm using Dots; it's great that they keep me developing, but it still doesn't seem to be progressing well because it hasn't fully matched the quality I want or my context. (I may need to redesign the workflow with Dots) I want to try a Duet soon, too.

All the features the author describes here are present in Grokbot, which I find the best by far, and I've tried Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, NanoClaw, IronClaw, Instinct, Muse, dots, and many others at length. The simplest and best overall package so far is Grokbot, by a respectable margin. Although I haven't tried Duet!

I guess I'm behind then! I presume Grokbot has to be powered by Grok? It's hard for me imagine delegating work to it when I have Opus 5.5. as an option.

I would be much more tempted to switch over to this from Hermes if I didn't have to deal with claudese.

What backend do you use for Hermes?

Mostly Gemini and Deepseek 4.1flash, but also 6.1 Sol since it can connect to my openAI account

Can't use it, won't log me in on GrapheneOS. ("Can't be verified via Google Play")

Via the webUI maybe?

Was hoping for a conversational AI that can do background talks, was just curious, but I prefer to set it all up using Hermes anyway.

Still disappointing to see so when things are not working on Graphene, though for some apps I suspect it's because I'm on Android 17?

Weird thing is that my banking is app is well known for not being allowed because "it uses the stricktest setting" (whatever that is) yet install and runs fine via Aurora store...

Btw, the normal Claude app does work.

I will be shocked if anything can beat Grok Bot for usefulness at this point.

It took me 2 days to hit “how did I ever survive without this” and it’s only gotten better.

Have you compared it to others, like Hermes or Dot? I have not forayed into Grok Bot so I have no basis for comparison.

I have and the biggest unlock compared to Hermes is that it comes with no setup and its own computers for each agent. While I’m perfectly capable of setting up my own Hermes, controlling access over my tailnet and setting it up with my other AI plans most non-tech folks are not.

Having this just work for non-tech people and still have advanced capabilities for the people who want to use it is a huge UX unlock.

The other thing thats critical is that it’s exceedingly cautious by default. My risk profile and concerns eased quickly.

I haven’t heard anyone give bots comparison.

Sounds like things the competition will copy in a few days? Or am I missing something?

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 have you tried to do that you found grok lacking for?

I can understand if you're building code, but for personal assistant stuff there's nothing it hasn't been able to handle from what I've seen.

Yeah, all those tasks I found Grok Bot lacking at were at least slightly relate to coding. Other than that it's great and I ma using it for more and more tasks both for my company and personal.

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

I meant „the distinctive elements that make Duet better will be copied“. Have you read the article?

my rpi5 + wireguard + pi.dev is my 'duet'

This is very close to my Nanoclaw setup. rpi5 on an isolated network.

I am not having good luck with it when using it the same way I used Open AI Dot. It will not even download from dropbox.

I will say the Dot computer is a nice escape hatch for when built in plugins fail. Duet seems more inclined to give up if something doesn't have a clean integration option.

I'm amazed anyone on HN is willing to run Muse that isn't a FB employee or tech journalist.

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.

I haven't used GrokBot, but I have been sort of amazed by how popular it is. I don't have the numbers but even my friends who otherwise dislike Elon have at least given it a try, and several of them use it daily.

It makes me want to check it out just to see if there's some magic UX juice they put in there. Then again I also don't want to take any risks heh.

Most people probably wouldn’t cop to the real reason they use the CSAM and non-consensual nudes generator

I've also noticed anything related to GrokBot gets massively boosted on X, which is probably serving as a huge marketing channel. Plus anyone with a Cursor subscription gets access.

Cursor started to push it recently, too. They put a popup when I logged in to tell me about it.

I know someone who isn't an Elon fan at all but has switched completely from Dot to Grokbot. Most of their company has done the same and now they are contemplating cancelling their OpenAI plans (they still use Claude heavily, but Duet isn't available on Teams plans).

Can you name the company to give the rest of us a heads up?

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.

I disagree. I would gladly hear why they think there are no privacy concerns or why they don’t care about their privacy so much. I find it hard to understand.

Almost all of my tech worker friends use Instagram. It's almost universally used. I never talk about it because anything positive about any Meta property on this site gets downvoted. It's been like this for years and only gotten worse over time.

I use Muse to read X for me with a burner account, since I want to follow certain topics but don't want to use X. It posts digests a couple times a week to a discord channel I gave it access to. It's fine and I think there are plenty of ways of using it that give essentially nothing to Meta in the way of data. Still I wouldn't recommend it to any of my non-technical friends, since I think the natural progression with these things is to just connect more and more parts of your life to them.

I'm a long time HN user. I work on privacy tech (as in I'm paid to work on it).

I have a Facebook account and use Instagram.

My reasons are many:

I believe it should be my choice what happens to my data, and don't particularly care if Meta has the parts I share with them.

I don't believe advertising is intrinsically evil, and in fact I think it's probably been a net-good for society.

I think Meta is a better steward of my data than ISPs or telecoms.

what about the abuse of advertisements to cause civil unrest, abusing data to control political elections, advertisements that break consumer laws. Facebook has shown it cares more for money than being a steward. Don't see how you can trust them.

I'm aware there are downsides.

I'm old enough to have lived without the internet. I'll take this over that anytime.

> Facebook has shown it cares more for money than being a steward. Don't see how you can trust them.

It's precisely this love of money that make me trust them. They value what they get from my data, so they do their best to keep it to themselves.

That's much better than ISP (for example) that sell raw traffic data.

lol no.

It’s the law that keeps them in check.

I like the law too.

Both things can be true.

I said the same for years after smartphones came around.

In my book, if you use a Smartphone that's either Android or iPhone, I can't take seriously the claim that you value your privacy.

Privacy is a continuum.

Ive never had a meta account. Zuckerberg still has all my data and knows everything about me. At some point people decide its not worth hiding from mega corps

Note to everyone writing blog posts: Please start your post with one or two sentences explaining what you're posting about.

What is Duet? I have no idea even after skimming the article.

Edit: first google result is https://www.duetdisplay.com

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

I know. The full product's name seems to be "Claude Duet", which would make everything much clearer and easier to google it.

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

I could deduct some of that from this sentence, sure.

But I wrote this comment because the article was frustrating for me to read. One single sentence would've made it much less confusing:

  Look, I really didn’t want to like **Claude** Duet, **Anthropic's new personal AI assistant**. I don’t want to be an Anthropic fanboy and ...

I'm also known to flag this kind of shortcoming in all technical documentation I review, and it annoys a lot of people that I do. I've put my judgement to the test already a few times in team meetings when someone objected this specific remark. Many times I could prove that there are always a few people in the room that would've benefited a lot from such a simple clarification. They just didn't speak up or ask, because they thought they were the only ones that didn't know a specific term.

My intention is also not to be rude, just creating some awareness for this issue.

Engineering's stereotypically low empathy for those who may not connect dots as readily is no problem if teams would make a habit of these simple mechanical compensations.

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.

Touche. I should have at least linked to the product announcement.

[Anthropic Claude] Duet is the future of chatbot interaction

Every time I see an article about another agentic harness all I can think is "people still run other people's code?"

In all seriousness, the complaints here just feel like UI friction you can address yourself if you just build your own harness (e.g. snappy replies -> parallel threads and appending to common context).

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?

Depending on what you need, you can build a custom harness via pi really fast. I tried OpenClaw for weeks, and it took me a lot less time building my harness than trying to figure OpenClaw out.

I do agree. We have a household assistant and it's not particularly different in functionality from the ones by mainstream labs. It's not a lot of work to build. Because we run on our own LLM base we can also do things like plumb our home cameras into it and so on.

The first sentence really do reads like trolling.

You're getting downvoted, but I do increasingly find myself building products for a user of 1 (myself), sometimes not even bothering to create a Github repo. But integration is often the hard part, and it's nice when a company makes a core product that does the hard parts for you.

Once the novelty wears off it goes in the drawer next to the rest of AI innovation

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com