YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Claude Duet is the future of chatbot interaction

52 points nathanfig 4 hours ago 38 comments

andix 1 hour ago | parent

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

user- 1 hour ago | parent

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

vineyardmike 1 hour ago | parent

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

vorticalbox 1 hour ago | parent

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

https://duet.so/

MaxLeiter 1 hour ago | parent

That is not the official anthropic link

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

longerthoughts 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

thisisnotauser 1 hour ago | parent

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).

scottyah 1 hour ago | parent

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.

infecto 1 hour ago | parent

It is just rsync after all right?

gessha 35 minutes ago | parent

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 27 minutes ago | parent

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?

aliasxneo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

james_marks 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

user43928 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

xnx 1 hour ago | parent

[Anthropic Claude] Duet is the future of chatbot interaction

imagetic 1 hour ago | parent

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

meowface 59 minutes ago | parent

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 55 minutes ago | parent

Or GrokBot that isn’t an Elon employee.

enraged_camel 5 minutes ago | parent

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.

mcmcmc 3 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

ipsum2 52 minutes ago | parent

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 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

Karrot_Kream 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

danielklnstein 6 minutes ago | parent

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.

dovin 2 minutes ago | parent

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.

dgellow 1 hour ago | parent

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

bluecalm 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

dbbk 38 minutes ago | parent

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

ActionHank 1 hour ago | parent

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

aniceperson 45 minutes ago | parent

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

ianm218 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

baron3dl 36 minutes ago | parent

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

hmokiguess 30 minutes ago | parent

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

hlynurd 28 minutes ago | parent

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

hangrybear666 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

teekert 23 minutes ago | parent

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

TomGarden 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

mbesto 11 minutes ago | parent

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.