I do like the embrace of The Office as a theme because it so accurately represents the dysfunction of all of the agent swarms I’ve seen: Different personalities pursuing their own little goals that are all competing with each other in subtle ways that eventually leads a funny collapse of the outcome you wanted.

There’s no denying that LLMs are getting better by the month, but the current wave of LLM office and personal assistants reminds me of the old trend where people were hiring personal virtual assistants from foreign countries to manage their work and interface with people. It seemed like an obvious time saver but every time I interacted with someone’s virtual assistant it felt like I was playing a little game of navigating hidden structures and communication barriers to get the message I needed to the person hiding behind it all. Then there were the inevitable scheduling failings, missed meetings, dropped emails, and other things that get blamed on the assistant. I’m getting deja vu watching it all happen again with LLMs replacing virtual assistants and outsourced teams.

Maybe these concepts work for people who are trying to solo dev and who find it interesting to set up and debug little systems for everything they do, but I really don’t like working with anyone who surrounds themselves with one of these multi-agent coordination systems as an external shell. Keep it to the internal work and maybe it’s fun for some people.

Hey guys, thanks for putting it here, I am Chaitanya I built Munder Difflin, I am here to answer all your questions(except nylonstrung).

For people who haven't tried it: Munder Difflin is a local multi-agent harness that wraps around your existing claude code and codex subscriptions(we literally support almost all harnesses/coding agents).

Simulations are deterministic, they do not consume tokens, infact most of the users(20K+ in a week) say that it has reduced their token consumption due to a benchmarked memory layer acting as a hive mind called mempalace.

Common use cases apart from coding: 1. Create triggers that runs an live agent with your context(Webhooks, slack, scheduled) 2. Almost any kind of automation for yourself(I make it review PRs, send cold emails with enriched context, manage discord, Send myself analytics about how app is doing on email an end to end AI video production and posting workflow in 1 prompt and then some)

I'd love to hear your feedbacks on it.

Ok, I've been running it for a couple hours and below are my thoughts. Please note that I do find it fascinating even if most of what I'm about to say is complaining about the parts I like less.

- Pipelines, not agents. Roles, not agents. I really don't like the idea of defined agents with their own prompt. I want to define roles and spin up N agents with that role. Furthermore I want pipelines "Plan -> Review Plan -> Approval Gate -> Develop -> Code Review + Fix loop -> QA -> Approval Gate -> Merge -> [Ship]". I don't like the work just bouncing around seemingly randomly

- Settings don't seem to save/persist? Or some of them don't. I couldn't let "Michael" spin up agents on "his" own and then randomly he did it even though the setting was still off. Settings has the normal LLM jank I've seen.

- macOS Notifications are broken, they send for any little reason, and then they don't send when you're actually needed. It's like each agent finishing a round causes a notification.

- Speaking of missing notifications, the _most important_ screen to me is the "Ask Me" tab under "Michael", where they ask questions (more on that later) but there is zero indication that anything is waiting for you. You have to dig into it yourself.

- The "Ask Me" tab is great.... when it works. I've had to unstick agents or answer questions they were waiting on answers for

- Trying to be too cute, it was cute for a minute, now I don't care (and I _love_ The Office). I want a more utilitarian view. I want to see questions, plans, be able to inject new ideas, and a small overview of what each agent is doing. I don't need half the screen taken up with a "game ui".

- Why no clear? I don't understand at all the idea of them keeping context. Maybe I'm missing something and I shouldn't be using persistent agents except for more persistent jobs (like Michael's?).

It's an interesting concept, very "Gas Town", and it make me want to write my own that does more of what I'm looking for but I don't have the time (or tokens) currently to take on another project. My current best approach of herdr+6-10 Claude Code sessions feels like it works better than this and keeps me close enough to the decisions I want to make.

This is fantastic. As the little joke I hope it is. Everyone gets their own small disfunctional group, and gets to figure out the challenges of management. You, the manager, are Michael. You know you have to produce something, and you do, but you have no real idea of how. Your diligent agents are Dwight. Overly literal sycophants that are ready to leap to action at your slightest command without any question.

I do think a lot of folk would benefit from the introspection this offers. We've all been given the opportunity to become middle (and middling) managers, and a lot of the challenges we face are those of people who direct. Setting direction is tough. But LLMs are awesome tools.

I've thought about something like this. When there is a lot of stuff happening at once, it's a mistake to try and communicate it all with text. Agents use tools, reference databases, reference the web, interact with other agents, and spend time processing the information. When you have several agents operating at the same time, communicating what they are doing using some kind of spatial map is a really smart idea.

The office is a decent analog for such a map. Referencing a database? That operation along with processing the information takes a little bit of time. During the interval, have the avatar move to a file cabinet and back to their desk. Have their computer screen change when they access web resources. If they use a particular tool, it can be represented somewhere in the room and used the same way. Interacting with another agent can be similarly represented.

Symbolizing the operation of the agent with movement and behavior is a great way to give an overview. It would support a much richer intuition for how they are accomplishing a task. It wouldn't even need to be a game UI for people who will have a hard time feeling like they are doing serious work while watching what appears to be a game, but that wouldn't bother me.

If this dropped just five years ago no one would understand what on earth this software does . In many ways I still don't. Incredible the development we've seen lately, wonder what will stick and what won't?

This is super cute. I haven't tried it or anything but it's really fun, seems genuinely useful too. I don't really get people calling it cringe.

hey neat stuff. I'd actually like the option for the simulation NOT to be deterministic. I don't mind sacrificing 100% of any productivity for this.

1. Pranking: Rejected my PR? I'll put your keyboard in jello. Then the jello'd agent's prompts all get your keyboard is currently in jello attached.

2. Office Romance: Certain agents prefer to work with each other, but can randomly experience entertaining breakups.

3. Dundies style award ceremonies. The titles can show up under their names until the next ceremony i.e. "Hottest Agent in Office"

I'm still struggling with setting up long running agents. So far, it's just summoning an agent with a skillset for something specific and then it leaves again. Any tips?

I guess I wouldn't use it, but I just bought two of the asset packs of the pixel artist instead.

It's interesting how many of these projects are trying to model the worst parts of work (the office, the interaction and information messiness) and then automate that with agents.

an office of your clones. next they'll add a clone HR department to handle the clone performance reviews, and a clone IT guy who's also a clone and keeps filing tickets against himself.

Reference to the office is hilarious, this might actually get as much work done as Michael did in the show

This is funny and shamelessly bad at the same time. I have no idea how it's getting so much attention.

I don't understand what is this used for. Is my kitty terminal not enough of a multi-agent orchestrator? Genuinely lost.

This looks like a tool from Cowboy Bebop.

Is it just me or do AI made websites tend to be too verbose?

This is cute and fucked up at the same time.

This project is cringe and I really hope we see less stuff like this