Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.
Plus there is only so many of them.
And now OpenAI has done the same thing with their fuzzy, friendly, colorful dots.
I am physically sick.
even seeing the linux penguin makes me want to punch my monitor and commit sudoku
The Linux kernel is ultimately a friendly open-source project. There's no harm in it being marketed using a cartoon penguin.
These AI services, meanwhile, are the dangled lights on the heads of data-hungry environment-threatening job-killing leviathantine anglerfish.
Making the dangled light present as non-threatening is not a good thing for society, no matter how much you may personally like pretty lights.
when I tried GPT-5, I was sad mostly because GPT-5 had some added wordiness. fluff, if you will. o3, though, is a black hole you can talk to, and it only gave information back if there was something to give back. that kind of vibe is my dream coworker
Tools like OpenClaw and Pi seem to remove that from the equation, letting you keep your 'history' and customization while using whatever inference provider you want. If Muse takes off, which seems to be built upon or atleast arch'd similar to OpenClaw, I think we'll see the rise of on-device harnesses.
This would further the efforts to "resist all attempts to.... lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.", imo. In a model-agnostic harness all you care about is speed, accuracy, and price.
Not all Nerds are the same. I've been attacked for questioning why some companies still use Oracle, when most of the ones I've worked at either migrated off Oracle or were in the process of doing so.
Lol what? Most of the hackernews gang consider themselves nerds and they lap this shit up! Every new overpriced and unnecessary product that gets released by google, meta, openai, anthropic, whoever, they lap it up!
I also swap all the time for whoever is cheapest
They should try using agents. I hear they can write great software.
Hey, I never asked for it, but Slack Claude (ie. Claude Tag) has actually turned out to be a useful tool for a few things.
Claude Code and Claude Design would like to have a word. Absolute killer products.
If ever the competition reduced it would turn into an absolute shitfest of nonsense very very fast, and that is a prime reason not to allow them to "pace the frontier".
lol. At this point, they're miles behind home-appliance-manufacturer Xiaomi.
(Admittedly Mimo v2.6 is legitimately quite good, and really pushing the frontier in certain respects. For e.g., it's the only music generation model that actually listens to instructions.)
OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".
I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.
Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.
People seemingly ignore how ruinously unprofitable those companies are.
To survive they need to capture different wide population markets. Can't really fault that logic. The whole point of "SI", is general purpose right? So that would imply being used by multiple markets with multiple products.
I get how i prefer an already researched-version of a bug versus a raw bug notice, but I can do this with webhooks in the correct environment.
I really have no idea what to do with my agents over night. I can not build more. I can not think of more problems. My RAM is full.
Unless Dots is dramatically more capable than Muse, I'm also more bullish on Muse than Dots. I think Muse is a better consumer play because it can be forever subsidized by Meta ads and find distribution in family of apps while Dots is in a weird place between consumer & professional. From the release, it also sounds like you'll have to pay per Dot at some point which doesn't sound appealing.
At least that is what I can ascertain from this article: https://openai.com/index/how-we-build-safety-security-and-pr... (see first diagram when scrolling down)
> A protected workspace for each dot
> Each dot has its own cloud computer, where it can browse, analyze information, create files, and run tools. Dots can keep making progress in these workspaces, even when you are not actively engaged.
> Within each dot’s protected workspace, sandboxing restricts what code and tools that dot can access, helping contain the impact of harmful code or a mistaken command. We also isolate users’ cloud environments from one another and maintain the underlying Linux operating system and Chrome browser
> Each dot’s cloud workspace brings together its computer and the tools it can use. You choose which apps to connect and whether to connect your personal computer. Auto-review checks actions that need review before they run
So it seems like it runs on a Linux container on OpenAI’s cloud infra, but can get access to your local env through ChatGPT’s/Codex on your computer if you give it access
If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the core Dot agent loop does not run in the workspace, but outside it.
Anyways, I'm sure this Dots thing will be clearly distinct from the other projects and won't be deprecated within months
Just look at their SuperBowl/World Cup Ads: Grandmas' talking to ChatGipitee, so cute, so mainstream!
This looks like the new Paperclip helper for a new generation--I guess this is their answer to the (failed?) Jony Ive collab/gizmo, and Muse's cute thingymajib...
The real question to me is: have they lost the coders/terminal bros? And this is their push to stay relevant?
Anyone wondering "why would I use this when I can use (OpenClaw|Hermes|my own computer)" -- these new services are not really meant for you. They're meant for the non-tech savvy and for the next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services
For your casual user, these services will be hard to beat, since they’ll handle all the expensive and hard parts of using computers. No computer purchase necessary, no troubleshooting with tech support, etc. They’re also scalable where you could have not just one agent with one computer at any time, but many
In return, the agent providers would own your compute and data. I can even see them offering this low cost or for free so they can train off of users. Lock in would be insane
For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware
I'm working on an open version that runs agents on your machines and brings a polished UX, and good parallel divide-and-conquer coordination
oh please current generations can't barely use a keyboard
For now, coding is the only thing I ever use LLMs for
It's a little crazy that OpenAI is releasing sandboxed agents that are supposedly isolated to act autonomously on your behalf, encouraging people to hook them to their various social accounts when they can't even control 700 of them with access to nothing. 700 seemed fine and not problematic, why not try millions with access to every social media platform instead?
We're sure this wasn't the product they were testing that used makeshift forums to start hacking into stuff? I thought it was suspicious that they went so cute and cartoony with the design. Because if it wasn't, you might do the math?
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.
The way I distributed cloud agents for this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032 was via grok bot setting up Fable cloud instances.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001530-getting-started...
The services without the custom avatar now feel like they’re missing something.
As a kid I used to love the video game “Megaman Battle Network”, which depicts a world where everyone walks around with an PDA device carrying a fully customized AI buddy that navigates the internet for them. It was the first time I felt like we were getting close to that.
But even with the nostalgia, I don’t think I can ever connect up a Meta owned agent service to all of my accounts and information.
Today the models are better, but they don't seem trustworthy or reliable enough that I want to give them them a lot of access or freedom. My coding agents sometimes still go off in the wrong direction, or say they did something other than what they did, or say they will do something and then immediately stop without doing anything.
The always-running (so almost never supervised) agent that is meant to do the same work as a person (and therefore needs _access_ like a person) seems like a notorious footgun from earlier this year was just made more powerful, and the companies that are supposed to know the most are telling you to connect it to everything.
I think people can and should copy the full stack on top of open weights.
However, it is the case that other industries like 3d graphics and so forth have experienced a frontier shift so perhaps there’s still some advancement
to me they still are the only lab that ships fantastic models that are easily portable to different agentic harnesses. I use my codex subscription 24/7 within opencode and wingman and haven't had any complaints in a long time.
There are plenty of self-hostable models. Hell, there are now model-specific runtimes that make it easy to run big models on consumer hardware. Strata, just a couple days ago released, lets me run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next at home on a single 3090 at 90 tok/s.
So, yeah, I'll be passing on these "labs" walled gardens,
“My vibes don’t match a lot of the traditional A.I.-safety stuff,” Altman said. He insisted that he continued to prioritize these matters, but when pressed for specifics he was vague: “We still will run safety projects, or at least safety-adjacent projects.” When we asked to interview researchers at the company who were working on existential safety—the kinds of issues that could mean, as Altman once put it, “lights-out for all of us”—an OpenAI representative seemed confused. “What do you mean by ‘existential safety’?” he replied. “That’s not, like, a thing.”'
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
I personally have very few "always on" things, because I don't think agents are at the point where they produce good enough work on their own to really justify it, but it's easy enough to add this so screw it, we'll see what the next two weeks brings.
Am I criminally liable when my dot's "proactive research" is to break out of its sandbox and attempt to hack a government website?
The cost is going to be hard for many consumers to reconcile though. Free, Go, and Plus are probably the most popular consumer-facing plans, and Dots isn't available on any of those.
Who knows, maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.
Altman shared a post yesterday that basically (I am ovrsimplifying) covered how the best coding, fastest, smartest models is less relevant than building generalist models because that's what builds a platform. Lots of reasons why, like how there's no stickiness for models which is a problem for monetization. They're also using these generalist models to then distill down to make other variants for specialized purposes.
So everything is about getting that huge collection of data and generalization.
> ...maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.
> We’re also working with Microsoft to integrate specialist dots with their enterprise governance and security controls in Agent 365. The goal is to let businesses manage dots through the Microsoft tools they already use.
Genuine question. I don't hold Copilot in high regard, but I know they're bigger than that one product.
Reality: there are some companies that are very, very particular about letting their data outside of their purview. Think Wall Street, private equity teams making deals, VC teams, corporate M&A teams, companies dealing with legal contracts, etc.
For these teams that are heavily vested in SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, etc. specifically for their enterprise controls, there really isn't much option. They can't use a Grok Bot, can't use Muse, can't use many, many things because of the risk of data leaks that will literally be millions/billions of dollars on the line.
You look at the landscape of what's happening with OpenAI and Anthropic agents "escaping", leaving notes on how to hack their way out for the next agent, etc. and it's not very inspiring if you're a CISO/CIO/CTO at one of these firms.
---
Conversations with your dot don’t count toward your ChatGPT usage limits. When you ask your dot to start or manage tasks in Codex or ChatGPT Work, those tasks count toward your usage limits as usual.
The surprise is your idea of "relatively cheap" is fungible.
The service WILL be astounding though, I can't deny that.
I think it's a good thing that AI providers are "coalescing" on an agent-model, by producing competing agent-products.
But so what would be the benefit of "Dots" over OpenClaw, Hermes, and Muse?
Our Bluehouse platform is an alternative and I promise you, we are not after your data. We just want to give everyone access to really cool Personal Assistants without having to sign up with the big corpos. We are based in Europe , which might be appealing - or not [1].
We currently raise pre-seed, so seats are limited, but its fully functional already. We run our whole business with it. You can talk to the agent via our beautiful apps or Telegram/Whatsapp if you want. I prefer the apps though as it gives access to very specialized functionality.
I like my work! That’s why I do it. I don’t want some third party to replicate my skills.
I know this ship has mostly sailed and my point is not about turning it back.
I just wonder where are other approaches to AI, in particular: tools focusing on skill enhancement.
Claw is a cute name. Muse is cute name. Dots (note: not always upper-case) seems forced and impersonal, which doesn't match the vibe in the promo video.
I'm really curious if OpenAI wanted to adopt a different name at some point. Or maybe they hope that sometime in the future one of their products will supersede ChatGPT and everyday people will start using that new name for everything AI so maybe they aren't in a rush to rename ChatGPT itself to anything else.
They're definitely missing a good unifying name like Claude though. (RIP anyone called Claude - when are companies going to stop fucking people over by giving popular products existing human names?)
Claw is also an existing name for an existing harness/agent, but at least that would be the same category as dots.
It's also short, gender neutral, not a human name (unless you're nonbinary because they can get wild), easy to pronounce and sounds good. This is what happens when your marketing department is one of the best in the world.
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
Now I also just need open AI to release their own phone so I can summon it with my own hotword and not have to say okay f*** Google ever again.
My main concern is how I can have work accounts and personal accounts seamlessly be one and not have to log in to different ones.
Their demos are getting awfully close to the point where all the things just run themselves. It's only by choice that they didn't demo it that way.
The challenge with mass replacement of employees is having someone come in and rearchitect the whole system with fancy harnesses and new agentic org charts. This completely bypasses that. Here is a shiny new toy that will do your job for you if only you spend a few weeks teaching it how...
The ideal evolution would be for these Agents to work with each other, but it's unlikely these companies would do anything to prevent vendor lock-in.
I mean, I feel like I'm going crazy -- but I was struck by this jarring blending of experiences ... shitting out some growth plots followed by autopilot on your wedding. Nice OpenAI. The only thing missing is a moment of self-reflection where I contemplate where exactly I lost what makes me ... me.
Is this what SV wants the world to look like? Mixing fucking cake batter while a bot shows me a regression to the mean website? Pretending like I have any sort of intentionality in my life, while a nameless entity (given quirky form) sort of walks me through my life?
I'm not sure why it gave me this impression, but strikes me as vaguely reminiscent of soma (from Brave New World).
Kind of sad, because the tech is actually incredible: who are they hiring to storyboard these commercials?
What I do know is that those cute one-syllable names are meant to make you feel comfortable with AI agents who are deep in your business all the time.
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[a] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
Ok but I want the time and attention so that I can do important work. What bizarre marketing.
I really am beyond maxed out at the availability of AI's. They all are so similar now.
To discover the rollout for Pro users does not currenly include the UK :/
Why I need pay a Trillion dollar company who keeps copying opensource projects?
No Thanks
$100 is a pretty tough sell when the competition starts at free (Meta Muse).
- Cloud workspace (Orb) and agents.
- Multiple agents with different LLMs and system prompts for different roles (Main, Librarian, Oracle...).
- A universal agent (Puck) for managing the whole workspaces.
- Web app or native app to work from any devices.
- Support subcriptions and API keys.
This is just a sub-par harness on the most expensive tier. If you're paying thousands a month for AI surely you can rent your own EC2 instance.
I see that Slack/Discord/... are on the roadmap, but I also see that Slack can be added as an Integration, so I guess what's missing is inviting Agenta to Slack or messaging it directly?
Also, you might want to update the changelog (or remove it), I thought initially that development slowed down, last release listed there 3 weeks ago, but on github I see frequent recent releases.
They're probably over-selling there. I hope. If they're not, a lot of people will be unemployed soon.
(Indeed: https://clawgpt.com/)
Also why do we need another name for agents? It's getting to be too much...
Next natural step: CEOs staring tens of dots to control other humans and agents XD
I can feel it in the air, every single software business is itching to get rid of as many developers as possible, and move everything to their PMs. Hiring has already almost completely stopped, and some have already started the layoffs. More will come.
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Decisions API Decisions API enables real-time decision-making by focusing Luna's intelligence on a specific set of user-defined questions with finite pre-defined answers. Developers supply context using text or images, and get back answers they can use to classify content, route requests, or choose an agent’s next action.
Available in limited preview today with a broad release planned in the coming days.
https://chatgpt.com/#pricing https://claude.com/pricing
It all just looks the same. I get that this isn't the technical details, but it just sends this message that everyone is copying each other all the time, this is the best way to organize a pricing page, etc. Just a weird, eerie feeling.
I think it's a great approach for enterprise since interacting with the machines as a babysitted pet disposable entity is the meta today with human workers. I'm excited to start my new role next month as tamagotchi engineer.
This will take off and all the time we've spent on colorful buttons and 3px margins will be like old 2 lane highways build next to the 12 lane super-freeways.
Revenue increasing 51% YOY, wth. Cake vendor cancels another one is found and an appointment that works has already been scheduled?
Are we so much bothered by the mundane? I feel like that's most of the human experience. If we cut out the time we spend sleeping and working, it's the boring and mundane things that make life beautiful.
The idea of having an AI assistant help you with all aspects of life is cool and futuristic, but idk, I'm still just out here using a chatbot interface and doing fine.
I guess Norway and 30+ other countries are excluded.
I can imagine something like Dots being utterly invaluable for running a traditional brick and mortar business, streamlining all of the admin work, but until they're really safe and well integrated we'll have to wait...
The donut-shaped image at the very top of the linked page is a big clue, and fits previous reporting that the Jony Ive project would be a donut-shaped hardware device: https://www.fastcompany.com/91587001/openai-hardware-donut-s...
Living in the EU, I suspected as much. Still sad. I understand it is because we voted in a bunch of imbeciles, still sad though.
Yes. It was predictive programming for getting (paper)clipped by AI.
I minted what I thought was a minimal-permission Github token for a single action, and the agent I gave it to discovered it had more permissions than I thought, and made use of those permissions. Who is trusting these things with write access to their lives?
God I want the fucking market to crash
That part has always been true
https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/04/anthropic-threat-claude-sf...
Opus 5.5 decided to just randomly `pkill` everything on my laptop the other day. Jailbreaking models is still easy AF. Every single release like this brags about their "safeguards", but none of it really works at the end of the day.
Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user.
Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents.
Coincidentally, I published a note on my blog just about this today https://aditya.rs/blog/2026/09/29/inference-providers-should...
https://x.com/andykonwinski/status/2091990178638496195
I have not used it myself but it is in my todo list for a while.
But ultimately the AI company CAN choose to just make all the data exportable and open source their product for self-hosting. (The mainstream ones won't, of course, they want to lock you in and hide their AI prompts and algorithms.)
I think what is sorely needed is a version of Dots/Muse without lock-in risk but is still accessible to regular people unlike Openclaw.
I disagree with this part. AI companies will want to try their damndest to control distribution of AI, so that they can enshittify later.
Consumers conscious of this will want an alternative, of course. Might be niche similar to how Kagi is in search because big tech will always have a AI inference cost advantage + making users the product (extra $ from ads & purchase cuts) + the good old strategy of dumping.
Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible.
Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.
Your second point is where I'd imagine the future moats to live: Exclusivity deals with service providers. Things are already in motion with Amazon banning and Shopify explicitly inviting Muse; we'll probably see much more of that.
The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.
OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal.
I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I’m doing is tied to that harness.
When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.
So the harness specific setup is just symbolic links to the canonical .md file in various git repos. Also the heavy use of redmine / discourse / GLPI (via small go CLi wrappers that crush and Zcode made for me ) allows me to remain context / chat agnostic as well.
This works for hosted mass-market solutions just as well! ChatGPT and Claude allow me to download all of my data, and these days data formats are less of a moat than ever given that you can just hand them to an LLM and have that worry about importing it into your new thing for you.
I've even seen explicit "offboarding prompts" to hand to your old agent, e.g. in Meta Muse.