It is fascinating and I love to see it. Ultimately though, why not build your own? I think that in part is what we're beginning to see-- highly customized and personalized software. I take most of these as inspiration these days and just build my own. Nothing you can't hammer out with a few good Claude sessions.

It's really hard to focus on the unique aspect of your tool because it runs the risk that people will think it's unfamiliar and therefore not useful to them. That's why a lot of the tool marketing pages look the same even though the tools themselves might be different or innovative

AI needs entirely new primitives in many areas.

> Why not just use claude Cowork?

Because people want to be able to do things like use their own clients of pi or opencode with LLMs they run themselves, such as the just released deepseek v4 flash 0731, not permanently tied to an Anthropic ecosystem of non-open-weight LLMs and pay forever per token.

> Why not just use claude Cowork?

Many people don't want to support a company pushing for regulatory capture.

this one is trying to cashin on the 'multiplayer' keyword after the buzz that 'no one has cracked multiplayer yet'. well the ui sucks and is not it.

maybe you want to use a different model?

Still figuring it out, but it's been really convenient to have an always-on agent that has access to internal systems and can be triggered by webhooks. Some examples of what we use it for:

- automatically fixing simple CI failures

- getting production alerts and automatically creating RCAs and a fix PR

- periodically checking slow DB queries and finding ways to speed them up.

- creating charts to answer one-off questions about our data

I've tried using it as an on-the-go coding agent as well, but found I prefer more interactive agents, so I can see what the code looks like.

Hermes is what I was using but I still found it annoying I often wanted to operate 1-2 levels deeper.

Yesterday I just decided to try writing my own version (100% just for me, not open source, no monetization plan, incredibly custom) and I've been enjoying working on it so far (I know, I know, it's been a day, honeymoon period and all that).

Part of it is I like building software (even if I'm not writing every line) and part is I like having full control. Turns out (and many people have said this) the basic agent loop really isn't all that special. There are a million levers to pull and what not outside the base loop but that the fun part for me. Trying out different ways to add on to the core concept.

I'm really enjoying being untethered for things like "how will I monetize?" or "how do I make this generic so others can use it?". If I need functionality I just add it in, I don't need to make it infinitely pluggable, etc.

All that said, I'm thankful to things like nanoclaw and then Hermes for exposing me to the core ideas. I just want to put my own spin on it.

Hermes is huge and packed with features you probably don't need. I prefer smaller one I can extend as necessary, there are so many on github now and it is fun to test them but have been impressed with dirge (https://github.com/dirge-code/dirge) not affiliated.

I have one reading my second tier RSS feeds and newsletters and giving me news/market updates filtered for things important to me

I'm currently using it to help me with my oncall, first responder to our any production alerts. It's not as efficient as coding agent by default, but it's been tremendously helpful to me.

I think most people use it to poll their email and instant messages and whateva with an LLM

hermes is great to get started with, but it's packed to the gills with stuff you'll probably use one time just to test it. and this eats in to your context so if you're hoping to run it on a lighter-weight local model you'll run in to some trouble. if you go into it planning to customize/thin it out it's solid

Honestly the limitations/security of it kind of made it a novelty for me. I use web hosted stuff like surfboard now for my llm-assistant work stuff.

A team of brilliant people who work at YC shipping products internally and externally.

I think it's the website you're on

Someone from Y Combinator made some software. Must there be narrativization of everything?

> Em-dash (—) is COMPLETELY banned. It is the LLM's signature stylistic crutch and it is the #1 visual Tell in production tests. There is no "limited use" allowance, no "natural language frequency" allowance, no "in body copy is fine" allowance. None.

I guess the em dash is really dead.

Doesn’t this just lead to a new “basin of tastelessness” that, sure, looks different from current slop, but is itself just eventually slop all the same?

It's an HN-ism that it's OK for titles to make readers do a little work.

It's not very novel

XY problem, don't expand the design doc before you have the idea for the design. Don't compile down into lower abstraction levels until necessary

i think it makes perfect sense and I'll probably adopt the same posture for my open source project.

The idea is that the core dev team is the one with the AI harness. If someone contributes an idea they can just feed it to their AI to implement it and it probably costs 10 minutes of human time, because they trust that their harness will be able to implement the feature competently.

So, because the implementation effort is so low, the only aspect that matters if the quality of the idea. It's way easier to screen human written text than a bunch of code in a PR. If you just give them code, they would not know if you made it with a competent harness. If you gave them a AI written design they would have a lot more to read through to decide whether it's slop. If you just give them an idea it's a lot easier to determine whether it's high quality.

Coding agents are extremely useful but often extremely dumb with design. If you do not design the software yourself, you will probably get slop. This was always the core issue with vibe coding.

They specifically ask not to create/submit a formal proposal. I do not see any restriction on the use of AI otherwise.

Yet the README is generated ("Two skills maintain the boundary in both directions.") and the demo is .. a Mobius strip?

I'd prefer if you explain what it is you are building in the form of human-written text.

That's not surprising. I have much the same thing in my latest open-source work[0]. I have a workflow that's working nicely with agents, it's more of a pain to review someone else's code than it is to get a well-written description of their problem.

0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre?tab=contributing-ov-file

SQLite has a conceptually similar contribution process:

> the project does not accept patches from random people on the internet

https://sqlite.org/copyright.html

In their case, it's motivated by a desire to keep copyrighted code out of the SQLite implementation, but I'm sure it has a nice benefit of making it so that an extremely widely used project doesn't get drive by, low effort code review requests while still allowing the community to engage.

Asking that "random people on the internet" don't sent code is not altogether a novel, post-AI idea.

As someone who has maintained an open source project, I much prefer written bug reports and feature requests to drive-by PRs. (I almost don't even care if they are LLM-written.)

I tend to think we have an industry AI mania problem, but I’m not sure I understand what you find psychotic about this. I find it better to get a text suggestion or description of the change, then work on the implementation myself, even without using an agent, instead of reviewing LLM diffs that I know I will want to tweak to my taste

Sounds to me they're asking people to basically at least put the starting stones to something that looks like a specification. Not a bad idea to gate the flurry of feature requests to people who actually can think 10-15 minutes about the feature they're suggesting/asking for.

as a maintainer, seems nicer than getting a slop pr with no context.

the other option is to generate 5000+ open issues that no one cares are open.

Also, it's a AI project; what, exactly, do you think they're going to try and do?

So, basically,

> Please write our prompts for us