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.
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.
To put things in perspective, humans with a 25% lower error rate than Cowork are pip'd and usually let go.
As with junior programmers and their love of vibe coding, I've found that anyone who thinks that AI tooling right now is "amazing" lacks the skills, knowledge, and/or experience to know that it really isn't.
This will be like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 all over again, and all the AI sycophants will be coming to the rest of us begging for new jobs that they're not qualified for.
I have lots of highly-educated knowledge worker friends who aren't particularly techie but who swear by Claude Cowork.
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.
I might be out by a factor of 2/3 (automatically applied promo deals/credits make it very hard to be sure), but we get 3k messages per month for a seat count of ~60, and finance are concerned about cost.
$2 is probably a good deal for the Extra High 8 minutes of agentic searching/coding/etc when it one-shots a whole project.
$2 is a terrible deal for a 5 second instant retrieval.
For what kind of message are you seeing that kind of charge?
sama was the CEO of YC. OpenAI knows the value of influencing the sentiment here and then naturally its competition too.
It doesn't just have access to my entire machine - it has access to all of our Corporations Google Docs, Google Sheets, Jira Tickets, Confluence, Slack - everything (Except, weirdly - our GitRepos - they aren't confident enough there to let CoWork talk to them)
Weirdly - my work email is mostly irrelevant - nothing in their other than some sporadic company announcements - I'll go a week without looking at it - so it's the least concern. (Very different from personal gmail which, omg - if anyone got into - game over)
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)
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.