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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From a naming terms yes, the closest equivalent of the past is the term "framework". Having written a Go service framework that's how I perceived it and as I started to work on agents, anything related to that became an "agent harness". I guess naming and terms change with different paradigms.
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.
: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.
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.
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.
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.
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