asim

Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.

Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.

Micro - a personal AI agent - https://micro.mu

Still iterating. Started with something else, then turned that into tools, then turns that into agents, then turned that into an assistant. Now trying to make it generally useful, quite painful at times... but want something that is not Muse or ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini... and not Hermes or OpenClaw. Currently just fixing all the broken styling/css, etc, no separate frontend, single Go binary.

Self host if you like - https://github.com/micro/mu

They were valuable at a certain point in time. In 2006 facebook was useful. In 2009 I found reddit useful. In 2013 I found twitter useful. And then eventually that value evaporated not only with algorithms but then the huge surge of people and what that meant for these platforms. The algorithms didn't help cut the noise in some ways it just made it work. Every platform became toxic. There is nothing wrong with social networks, but we don't need to connect EVERYONE. Smaller groups, social circles of 100 or less is ideal. Even then thats too big and is only useful where you're able to moderate it. Once things get too big it decays.

So no, don't regret it, maybe some of the twitter use. Yelling into the abyss is not healthy. But that's not to say we don't need private social networks. Not public. Private. Public social networks are going to need 10 years to reset.

Is GLM 5.3 Flash that good? I'm using it through atlascloud for my current project and testing performance against opus and gemini models. I think I'm mostly concerned about speed because they are mostly doing tool calls.

Also yes to an open runtime.

Quite literally Micro - https://micro.mu - a personal assistant.

My goal is to consolidate a lot of daily tool use in one place, what started as individual little apps for news, mail, chat, video, etc turned into an assistant and home screen dashboard which includes its own mail server, rss aggregator, and more. The business at the model, micro transactions using topup credits, which then takes a per request credit for what you use. Eventually maybe I'd do a subscription but also a business version that allows customisation.

Feedback more than welcome!

This is where we're at, and all us devs are taking a crack at building our own. Then some of them take off like OpenClaw or Hermes but I don't find myself particularly drawn to those solutions. Its still very hackerish.

Also the swiss army knife approach feels wrong. Too much choice. It can connect to everything, ok great, so I could chat with it on telegram, discord, email, whatsapp, etc. For a person who comes along and wants to configure great. But for someone who just wants to use it and get a web ui and maybe some sane defaults it's a bit overwhelming. If we can go from super highly configurable does anything to sane defaults with an opinionated interface and its open source we might get somewhere. Not only that but if we can get to like Proton/Notion sort of equivalent alternatives where everything is not controlled by one player that would be good. Proton did mail. Notion did docs. Maybe someone else will do chat.

Hello. Me again. I think for 10 plus years I've been trying to make something work. Like most of us engineers, we have a lot of ideas. And after spending a bit of time at Google in 2011-2013 I felt like I understood the direction of where things were going. Obviously technology takes time to catch up. I don't think personal assistants are the end point. To be honest, I think ambient computing and emergent behaviour is sort of a feature thing. But there are stepping stones. Personally having seen Muse and other things from large players. I feel like we have to keep attempting to build alternatives. I'm a big Google user. I'm a big Gmail user. Big, but at this point in the field of personal AI, I do think there's an opportunity to start to shift some of that dynamic. I've always built infrastructure from the ground up and so many of you will have seen me here over the years building a go framework or building a platform as a service or apis for developers. Ultimately, it was all attempting to get at some sort of end consumer and personal solution. I just felt like it would be really great if I could run the whole stack myself. But I never felt like the tools were in the place for that. Now it really feels like not only can you do it but you don't have to assemble the parts. You can literally build it all in one. So one of the things I've done is actually baked in an SMTP server and an xmpp server and some other protocols. I can also send SMS and WhatsApp to this. I can email it. I can use an IMAP inbox if I really want to. And I can backup all my storage S3.

I'm showing the front door but there's also a back door which is the apis and the MCP server.

It's all open source https://github.com/micro/mu

I've posted that here before. But you'll see from my history I think the goals keep changing or maybe not the goals but the way in which is presented. Ultimately, I think we should have an all-in-one solution that you can run yourself, but also that we have some alternative to what's out there. I think I'm a really big fan of email and smtp and the open protocol allowing you to self-host if you want. But ultimately we all went to big providers but there's potential for standalone solutions and I think the same should be the case for not just personal AI assistants but all home assistant software.

I think if you could run the full stack in the cloud or on a device in your house that would be the end game. At which point you could potentially cut the reliance on a lot of these large providers who have access to all of your data.

I'm not saying I have all the answers today but this is just one way I'm presenting it.

Decompress. A few days, a week. Let your brain clear. Get good sleep, go for walks, eat well and hydrate. Do little things you enjoy and take time to reflect. Try not to stare at screens too much. Look at the sky.

The answers will come. Once you've had some time to process you'll know what to do. Don't overthink it. Just take some time to relax.

I've had a few of these breaks in my life. It's time to take stock and move on. Sometimes retrain or learn something new. But ultimately breaks are good. Just don't force the change. It will come. Slow and steady wins the race.

Mu - Tools for Agents. An MCP server and web app that provides real time access to news, markets, weather, video, places, search, etc. It's sort of extension of a previous idea I had to put all the key tools and services behind a single api and access token. I don't know that it's quite there yet. The idea might change. Still looking for feedback.

https://micro.mu https://github.com/micro/mu

Also have an agent harness and service framework in Go

https://github.com/micro/go-micro

:D you know last time I built software go-micro was 4 years slogging it out on my own. Then raised funding and had 4-5 engineers working on it. Now you can honestly go very far with Claude, copilot, codex, etc. Still the person leading needs to understand what they're doing.

Here's the last one. https://github.com/micro/go-micro

Thanks for that commentary. I think it's an evolution of an idea. So way back when I was working on micro services and apis. I had this idea of putting all the common API building blocks in one place. So rather than signing up to twilio and Auth0 and Google and whatever other API providers it would just be in one place and you would get this kind of streamlined simple way of accessing it. One token you could scope it to. I put that idea on the back burner when I ran out of money.

This project didn't start as tools for agents. It started as a personal app server where I could consolidate a lot of my daily habits that were apps. I actually wrote that by hand. Then I got access to Claude and it made life easier so I was able to extend it.

But I feel like my original goal was sort of unfulfilled and that's when I realised all of this stuff could actually be useful to agents and the same idea I had about apis for developers could apply to agents. So maybe it's not going to be something everyone wants to use. But for me I'm kind of interested to build this collection of let's say a hundred of the most useful tools put them behind one mCP server with access through one token and one account and then I'm going to start to kind of program against it. And the idea is well. If you give the agent access to real world things, you could build real world agents. And maybe people are already handcrafting this but then it's not made for that audience right. So I think that's why hacker news can be somewhat subjective. I've always found it quite polarising whenever I posted anything because you know there's this half that just say well. I don't need this because I can do it myself and then there's the other half they're like. Wow, this is cool.

Anyway, I appreciate the feedback

Thank you for the interest and discussion all!

Thank you! The news is an RSS reader/aggregator, so picking select sources to pull from. I opted not to use anything else as this works quite well and we don't need more news than we have. Plus we have Brave for web search. The sources are like the BBC, the guardian, techcrunch, hackernews, etc.

Thanks. We can do. The idea was that it as more like WeChat or Telegram mini apps. So they are things you'd build in the system that have access to the system. I'd be curious to know your use case or what you want out of it.

You're right about that and I totally hate it as well. I had originally written it myself and then it got revamped along the way as I tried to change the positioning of the system from a personal home server to tools for agents.

Good observation thank you.

Anything architectural like this is super interesting. We keep getting more powerful models sure. We're getting agents ok. But this coordination of many agents. This is the part that's really going to scale very fast and across many many machines in parallel. Very cool.

I'm not confused. I was highlighting my past experiences and was curious to know what APIs/MCP servers or external resource people are using for Agents. That's it.

Quite honestly IPOs and the stock market in general is a Ponzi scheme. This is something I would never have said before. I am not a skeptic. I invested in the markets for years and made money on Amazon, Google, twilio, and so many others. But I also lost a lot of money buying near or after the IPO. The game is rigged. Those who put money in post IPO in the 12 months after are left holding the bag for years. It takes 10+ years to recover that. The people who invested pre IPO, the VCs, the bankers, etc. they are getting a good deal. In the case of VCs they are taking early risk. Not at the late stage. But earlier. In many cases it's been a long hold. Again 10+ years. But anyone coming in at the IPO you are buying at a peak when someone decided that's the perfect time to hype it. We're all catching a falling knife. Doesn't matter if the business fundamentals are sound. They become disconnected from realities of the market when it all gets tulip crazy.

These things have a way of working themselves out. But look at almost all IPOs and the next 12 months the stock is down 50+% so I'd rather wait. And honestly when I buy, it's to hold 10+ years, not make a quick buck and it's because I believe in the value. You can believe in SpaceX but also still believe the market and the dynamics of IPOs is almost criminal for retail investors.

It's almost as bad as crypto token sales tbh.

This thread is so spot on but I can also imagine the product development internally is moving so fast that they're trying to reconcile everything and can't. And this is the huge mistake so many companies make. Leave what's working alone. Build new adjacent things. It's clear they want to make money and work or code is the focus of enterprise. But never rename something Classic...so bad.

Ah interesting. So I'm using an English translation. Tbh I wish I could do more with the Arabic but the models are not perfect at that. But the idea of giving it whole paragraphs makes a ton of sense.

Tried to generate audio but wasn't satisfied with the interpretation of some words, saying that thou may try again.

That's cool! I did the same for the Quran to see how RAG works. I also indexed related works called "Hadith" and the names of Allah. It initially required indexing everything using OpenAI embeddings and then powered by it.

https://reminder.dev/search

It's also open source

https://github.com/asim/reminder

In case someone is using something we haven't heard of e.g some are running using cloudflare workers which also has some unique runtime properties. AWS has something called LLRT.

https://github.com/awslabs/llrt

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/

Curious to know who is using Deno in anger most days and in production full time? It seems like the choice of JS runtimes exploded over the past few years with that, Bun, etc.

I wrote recently about bringing back my open source project back from the dead. It's more than a decade old. Many life events occured during that time. It's tough. It's nothing like Lodash but honestly these things ebb and flow. It operates in cycles just as life does. Wish him all the best. Sounds like he had many tough years personally and I can relate.

https://go-micro.dev/blog/27

This was my assumption. Agents will supersede services. There will be many companies way ahead of the curve and the rest of the industry will take 5-10 years to catch up.

> The traditional startup growth arc assumes that the path from idea to scale is validate → raise → hire → build → raise again → grow → hire more → repeat. Now, AI has erased the expectation that each new phase in the startup lifecycle requires a bigger team, a different skill set, and a fresh funding round.

From 2015-2019 I spent the whole time saying "If I don't write the code nobody does". It was the point of saying to do anything requires a team, to build that team you need funding. It was a vicious cycle and took a long time to get enough traction to raise funding and do that... and then you end up in the MVP loop -> hire -> build -> validate -> rehire -> rebuild -> revalidate. Today all of that has changed. You don't necessarily need the team to write the code, it's for a different function entirely, maybe the original function which is the team was the orchestration engine for all the different pieces at play to make a company and product successful. The code is only half the equation. Looking forward to seeing how solo entrepreneurs leverage these tools and how teams transform using them.

I don't run local models, my devices are 5-6 years old and not powerful enough. It's a bit counter intuitive and different to what a lot of engineers are doing but I don't have a mac mini, I don't have a powerful laptop, a lot of my dev work has always been cloud based, on github, on a VM, I'm mostly using SSH from my laptop and now Claude Code on my phone (exe.dev is hands down the best experience I had on this front when the agent is literally on the VM).

In an ideal world, yea you can run local models, but I need a powerful always on device for that, or the latest gear, and it will never be as fast as what I can use from google, anthropic, or through an API call. I really wish it was different but I have to shell out a ton of money for that, and I guess it's usecase specific right. Maybe if my phone was super powerful and could run models that would be great, but then I have this issue with cloud sync and using things anywhere else. There will be a world in which local models and self deployed models make sense, this is going to be a core experience, but I personally can't run them.

Wow. So a deal like this is not overnight, its 6-12 months in the making at least. So the name change comes as they knew the deal was closing and doubled down on this new branding for customer agents. Maybe because Saleforce wants Salesforce Fin Customer Agent as a product. Who knows. Don't want to read the post...

When did intercom change its name to Fin?

Personal AI. Step by step evolving something I worked on for 10 years from an open source Go framework to APIs to apps and now agents. It's been an interesting journey. It's not finished yet. It's also not going to be a billion dollar company or have breakout success like OpenClaw but when you tackle personal problems I think they turn into more valuable opportunities. The opportunity to learn or have something that benefits a few people. I can't take off my entrepreneurial hat though. I keep trying to figure out how to make it work for everyone but I think that's the trap. Build for yourself. The rest will come.