There's a lot of negativity in here for Dots. I've been a pretty heavy user of Grok Bot, and here are a few thoughts a long the positive line.
1. Collaboration between always-on agents is a really, really powerful thing. It allows for domain-specific expertise that doesn't overload the context window, while still allowing for access to knowledge if they need it.
2. Domain-specific always on agents creates a good barrier of trust. One of the things I dislike about Claude is sometimes it's memory is all-encompassing. It's weird that it brings up things about my personal life when I'm talking about something related to my business. I've never had that happen with Grok Bot bots because I have one for my biz admin and one for my personal admin. They don't intertwine, which is quite nice.
3. Combined with cloud agents / cloud builds, things become really powerful for development. It was the first time that I felt there was a solution to the git worktrees / multiple streams at once issue. Each bot has its own computer and can spin up additional cloud agents. It comes at the cost of end to end speed - doing something via a grok bot often takes an hour end to end, whereas with a synchronous local prompt it'll take like 10min. The difference is I have to babysit one whereas the other "just works".
On the flip side, since using Grok Bots my inference spend has 2-3x'd. It's worth knowing that tradeoff. Nonetheless I think Luna is a fantastic driver for these, and OAI has very good pricing overall. I'd give these a shot - I think a lot of people would be surprised how helpful they are.
Yes. I built my own version of this for my side business about six/seven months ago and it's been great! I have two "AI employees" now and if I were actually focused on this business full time instead of part time, I'd create more.
Both are just Codexes running in a permanently rolling session in dedicated UNIX user accounts. They're wired up to Maildir so receiving a mail activates Codex and makes it read the new message, there are autonomy wakeup timers, they have accounts in my bug tracker and CI systems. They're currently useful for:
• Triaging and working on customer support tickets. Sometimes I wake up and the fix/response for a ticket filed by a customer is already there waiting for my approval. Recently I started letting them directly interact with customers in specific scenarios.
• Triaging the bug backlog. One of them decided to spend its "free time" finding old bugs that were fixed without being properly closed, or are dupes, so it's cleaning up detritus in the tracker.
• They obviously do all the coding and debugging by just assigning tickets.
• They keep an eye on a "pet" server the company has, and have proven able to fix it in the past when it ran out of disk space.
• They handle non-business projects I have for them.
• They help out with the release processes.
The dedicated home dir is very useful and they use it all the time as part of coding and investigating tricky issues.
My setup relies heavily on email, as everything bottoms out in email anyway. Watching them mail each other out of the blue to coordinate stuff is pretty cool.
Do you configure them similar to how Hermes does? A bunch of memory files that give it context and then each action/batch of actions is a fresh session? /
No, the session is never reset. It compacts continuously. That gives it a native "memory" and then it does record a diary in its home directory, and maintain a little topic-organized wiki. This seems to be enough, I've only very rarely experienced memory related glitches. The only time that springs to mind, it forgot that I'd given it credentials to a particular service and I had to remind it.
jjcm · · focus · HN ↗
1. Collaboration between always-on agents is a really, really powerful thing. It allows for domain-specific expertise that doesn't overload the context window, while still allowing for access to knowledge if they need it.
2. Domain-specific always on agents creates a good barrier of trust. One of the things I dislike about Claude is sometimes it's memory is all-encompassing. It's weird that it brings up things about my personal life when I'm talking about something related to my business. I've never had that happen with Grok Bot bots because I have one for my biz admin and one for my personal admin. They don't intertwine, which is quite nice.
3. Combined with cloud agents / cloud builds, things become really powerful for development. It was the first time that I felt there was a solution to the git worktrees / multiple streams at once issue. Each bot has its own computer and can spin up additional cloud agents. It comes at the cost of end to end speed - doing something via a grok bot often takes an hour end to end, whereas with a synchronous local prompt it'll take like 10min. The difference is I have to babysit one whereas the other "just works".
On the flip side, since using Grok Bots my inference spend has 2-3x'd. It's worth knowing that tradeoff. Nonetheless I think Luna is a fantastic driver for these, and OAI has very good pricing overall. I'd give these a shot - I think a lot of people would be surprised how helpful they are.
mike_hearn · · focus · HN ↗
Both are just Codexes running in a permanently rolling session in dedicated UNIX user accounts. They're wired up to Maildir so receiving a mail activates Codex and makes it read the new message, there are autonomy wakeup timers, they have accounts in my bug tracker and CI systems. They're currently useful for:
• Triaging and working on customer support tickets. Sometimes I wake up and the fix/response for a ticket filed by a customer is already there waiting for my approval. Recently I started letting them directly interact with customers in specific scenarios.
• Triaging the bug backlog. One of them decided to spend its "free time" finding old bugs that were fixed without being properly closed, or are dupes, so it's cleaning up detritus in the tracker.
• They obviously do all the coding and debugging by just assigning tickets.
• They keep an eye on a "pet" server the company has, and have proven able to fix it in the past when it ran out of disk space.
• They handle non-business projects I have for them.
• They help out with the release processes.
The dedicated home dir is very useful and they use it all the time as part of coding and investigating tricky issues.
My setup relies heavily on email, as everything bottoms out in email anyway. Watching them mail each other out of the blue to coordinate stuff is pretty cool.
KetoManx64 · · focus · HN ↗
mike_hearn · · focus · HN ↗
KetoManx64 · · focus · HN ↗