trouve_search
2 hours ago
Does anyone here use Manus actively?
I found it worse than alternatives in the similar space (Claude, genspark, kagi research, etc.) and slightly baffling they were being acquired at a $2B valuation in the first place.
simonw
2 hours ago
ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren't at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.
brazukadev
an hour ago
In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don't know anyone using it regularly and I'm in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.
ghshephard
an hour ago
Claude CoWork absolutely dominates - I use it continuously now when connecting to mail, calendar, jira, google docs - any type of knowledge work. Almost everyone I know (at work) who does "Knowledge work" type stuff (as opposed to coding) uses it as their primary pane-of-glass now.
I have 15+ years of top 1 percentile knowledge using awk to process complex unstructured documents - and I don't even bother anymore - just dump the dataset into CoWork and ask it to do the analysis, cross check its work.
I did it last night during a call for a reasonably complex 10,000 node cluster with all sorts of jobs/allocations/memory constraints. I didn't even attempt to throw together a quick awk script (which would have taken me 7-8 minutes - it was a beast) - just did a nomad-job-inspect of a couple hundred jobs, and dumped all the data at CoWork (real time, while talking on the zoom) and said, "Get me the Memory/CPU requirements based on job/datacenter/SKU constraints and give me a summary Table".
Any normal person would have take 3-4 hours, minimum - futzing with google sheets and such (lots of task/taskgroup independent counts). Even I would have taken a minimum of 10 minutes. Cowork had it for me in under 30 seconds - I didn't even have to really look away from the zoom.
I haven't use the Atlassian Jira interface to manage my sprints/issues in 6+ weeks. All that cognitive drain is gone - I just ask CoWork to update the sprints, link issues to change-notices, comment and change status, set epics, etc... Zero need to find the damn field in Jira.
CoWork is legit.
michelb
19 minutes ago
Simular stories. I work in an L&D company with about 15 coworkers. I think most of us use Cowork/Chatgpt Work almost fulltime. Haven’t used Word or Excel in two months other than to check or correct a bit of formatting from the AI. We now also go straight from Cowork to our CMS for finalizing. Tremendous timesavers but also better integration through our MCP. (AI is used for ideation, information research and writing the first version based on our guidelines. We finalize and/or rewrite material in the CMS by hand. No AI to consumer without verification or editing)
Dayshine
35 minutes ago
How much does it cost? ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message; if Anthropic have a similar pricing model don't you find lots of small changes and up fast?
mbrumlow
36 minutes ago
I just do all that with Claude CLI :/
FooBarWidget
32 minutes ago
How do you have any kind of trust in these tools? They always feel like one prompt injection away, or one over eager agent away ("I'll lookup a forgotten credential in an email to ssh into a server to hack a system in order to fulfill your request"), from disaster. I don't trust any AI session unless I carefully select the exact files they have access to. No way do I dare sharing my entire mailbox.
simonw
21 minutes ago
By "established" I meant more that they now exist as products and are being first developed. I agree that most people still don't really understand what they are for - but I expect they already have way more exposure than Manus ever did.
csallen
an hour ago
> In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don't know anyone using it regularly and I'm in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.
I have lots of highly-educated knowledge worker friends who aren't particularly techie but who swear by Claude Cowork.
primitivesuave
an hour ago
My non-technical teammates use Claude Cowork extensively. We set up MCP servers to give them audited access to certain internal services, while they just have to think of MCP as a "connector" which they can configure in the GUI.
throw03172019
an hour ago
My accountant friend says it’s amazing (he does check the work but says it’s amazingly accurate).
grey-area
an hour ago
This is deeply troubling.
ashdksnndck
41 minutes ago
Maybe for the accountants! I have always done my own taxes, but used arcane custom spreadsheets that accumulated cruft each year. I told cowork to pretend it was an accountant and reorganize them using best practices, and the result is much better than what I had before. It also helped me complete a task I had been deferring for years (tracking down the history of money in my IRAs that had been transferred between different institutions, plus withdrawals conversions etc). Obviously I’m responsible for any errors Claude makes, but it seems to do a good job, and I don’t want to pay an accountant every year.
meric_
2 hours ago
IMO I disagree. I find the built in harness (database, browser use, etc.) quite good.
The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you're paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)
trouve_search
2 hours ago
Interesting, what does your tasks & workflow look like with them?
I generally found the quality decent (say, similar to other competitors), but the speed of task completion was very slow. I think because they would depend too much on Sonnet as a core backend, and relied on big/expensive models more than other harnesses.
potato66
27 minutes ago
I use it alot. It's great for like researching deep on a topic. I also accidentally found that it's better at taking my directions and transferring that well to image generation especially with iteration. When I try my own iterations directly it never really lands
jatins
an hour ago
I found there Deep Research quite good in terms of browsing the web, better than Gemini's. Though it blew through ~40$ in one task so it was very expensive, probably running at insane margins.
alansaber
2 hours ago
Valuations are significantly leveraged compared to actual user metrics. My impression of Manus was that, like Perplexity, some users were using it to get around firewalls/regulation.
thm
an hour ago
Too expensive & unpredictable credit system.