Leave It to Manus | Hacker News Reader

Leave It to Manus

manus.im

51 pointsdoener35 comments

Feedback: change the name

The current name will prevent this product/company from ever making it to the mainstream, or at least make it way less likely.

A great name can truly make a huge difference. An OK name that sticks is a necessity. A name that is mostly “anus” is actively bad.

Mananus?

It brings bad analogies with body parts. So, let’s change the name schema to gods, mythology or something on the sky. Maybe Uranus could be a better alternative.

Or Janus?

To the OP, I say forget this advice. There's a headhunting company called Monster, arguably the worst possible name, especially for that business. Last time I checked they were doing fine. The truly worst thing is not being talked about.

Manus means hand in Latin, not a bad name at all for a tool that lends you a hand. Some people will recognize this, others not. They'll be fine, or if not, it won't be for that reason.

There is also MongoDB, which is also doing fine despite the very unfortunate name.

Not only hand, but force, violence, etc.: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

Or fate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manos:_The_Hands_of_Fate

If the context implies that it's hand as the instrument used in fight. I don't see how that's relevant here.

Manus = माणुस in Marathi which means Man

I really thought this name was from the common word for "human" in many languages across India. Slightly different pronunciations in some languages but I think many Indians would relate to the word as a derivative of "human".

I imagined it was short for "manuscript", as "manus" is the Swedish word for it. I also have a friend named Manu, who I imagine is hoping her name doesn't get Alexa'd.

The etymology of "manuscript" is from Latin "manu" by hand "script" (scriptus) written.

ChatGPT's logo looks like an anus yet they're doing just fine.

Laughing because I came here and this is the top comment. My coworker asked if I heard about it over the weekend, so I came to HN to search. "How do you spell it, m-a-n-t-i-s?" "No, like anus with an M in front."

Womanus? Ladus?

Seems OK to me, not great. I would have never made the connection to anus without you mentioning it, possibly due to the differing pronunciation.

Someone already made a clone with 15K stars: https://github.com/mannaandpoem/OpenManus

How does a repo get 15k stars in just 2 days?

China has a lot of users.

Bots and payola

I've been building something very similar, but OSS and running in the terminal, since 2023 (3.5k stars): https://github.com/ErikBjare/gptme

Currently working on building out a web UI (https://chat.gptme.org) and managed service for it.

Manus also seems very similar to Claude Code (but not open source either).

- Browser control tools

- Shell control tools

- File edits tools

- Task management workflow/tools

- Memory management workflow/tools

- Subtasks handoff to other agents

Anything major missing raw capability wise?

Maybe something to stop it succeeding at requests like "hack into some power stations and blackout city X" ?

What makes Manus so special is the combination of many agents with different abilities, controlled by a central interface. At the moment, due to the limited access, it is difficult to assess whether Manus has primarily put together an impressive combination of existing AI agents or whether there is more to it than that.

What is the value add here over existing frameworks for multi-agent workflows?

Back in the day, AutoGPT was trying to do the same thing. I wonder what became of it.

I've been building the same thing since 2023. It works really well, and was most recently pretty much cloned by Claude Code: https://github.com/ErikBjare/gptme

How do you figure claude code pretty much cloned this as opposed to aider or other CLI-based tools with similar features? Anything in particular?

Agree about changing the name. Manus is the joke name of child in a British TV comedy called Amandaland. It's more of a joke name than anything.

Manus means 'hand' in Latin. I thought that was the idea. Their logo is a picture of a hand, too. English "manuscript" comes from it.

Circo lavro holanda

Manus means Human in Marathi language.

And ~hands in latin

But that doesn’t matter if your goal is to become a global brand

Circa lavoro holanda

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