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mbesto 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
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 :)
cloudgazing 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
imagetic 1 hours ago [-]
I'm amazed anyone on HN is willing to run Muse that isn't a FB employee or tech journalist.
meowface 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cautiouscat 1 hours ago [-]
Or GrokBot that isn’t an Elon employee.
enraged_camel 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
joshgachnang 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
mcmcmc 10 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
ipsum2 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
baq 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
dovin 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
danielklnstein 13 minutes ago [-]
Okay, I'll bite - (1) I get enormous value for low/no cost (2) regarding my personal privacy, I don't have anything to hide, and I don't mind if my personal data is used to inform better-targeted ads or similar (3) regarding societal privacy, it's not as much of a threat as the average HN user makes it out to be, and the broad societal benefits of these subsidized services outweighs the overstated risks.
Karrot_Kream 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
red_candle_wax 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ianm218 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
aliasxneo 1 hours ago [-]
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.
user43928 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
james_marks 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
TomGarden 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
baron3dl 44 minutes ago [-]
Well, I guess this is the point I start getting left behind.
ActionHank 1 hours ago [-]
I dunno, Hermes has been real hard to beat lately.
teekert 30 minutes ago [-]
Can't use it, won't log me in on GrapheneOS. ("Can't be verified via Google Play")
hangrybear666 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
aniceperson 52 minutes ago [-]
my rpi5 + wireguard + pi.dev is my 'duet'
hmokiguess 37 minutes ago [-]
Once the novelty wears off it goes in the drawer next to the rest of AI innovation
hlynurd 36 minutes ago [-]
Are you talking about self-organising maps or the sci-fi level capability we've seen in the last year?
dgellow 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds like things the competition will copy in a few days? Or am I missing something?
dbbk 45 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean copy? This is the copy, it's already behind Muse, Dots
bluecalm 1 hours ago [-]
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.
andix 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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"?
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.
[Anthropic Claude] Duet is the future of chatbot interaction
thisisnotauser 2 hours ago [-]
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).
gessha 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
9dev 34 minutes ago [-]
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?
infecto 1 hours ago [-]
It is just rsync after all right?
scottyah 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Planning flights, accessing newspapers from my online library, checking stock in online stores, sending regular summaries of events and weather to plan activities.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.
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.
What is Duet? I have no idea even after skimming the article.
Edit: first google result is https://www.duetdisplay.com
Is it not obvious that this is an Anthropic-made "personal-assistant-type harnesses"?
https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet
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.
https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet
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).
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.
i.e. It saw I had an optometry-type appointment this morning and supplied some questions I might want to ask or consider.