One thing that this highlights for me even more than before is that having accounts for my bots is what I really want. I want SaaS providers to catch up to bot use. They need their own accounts on a lot of these services and per-seat pricing works against this.
As an example, I wanted to set up users in AWS identity center so I can give view only access to bots for my infrastructure, but that requires different email addresses. I set up an alias on my existing user so I didn't have to do that, but ideally I could have accounts for agent1 and agent2.
I can usually find workarounds like this but I feel I shouldn't have to. I don't want the agents to share my permissions in general since I'm often the admin. I want to give them limited scopes whenever possible.
edit: for reference, a Google Workspace user is ~220CAD/year and a github user is ~50USD/year. That is quite expensive if I want to add a couple of agents (well over 500CAD/year).
The big difference probably will be the compute use, the big players will introduce A2A stuff sooner than later, than you don't need to login into any services per webui.
I think we will also see more streamlined things, like verified actions / signed actions, etc.
The main issue are businesses where the per-seat model is their entire business model. There is a balance between taking advantage of the opportunity of the explosion of bots by offering a lower price option to attract new users and cannibalizing your existing users who might swap to the lower price option seeing it as good enough.
On my side it is less the streamlining (AI can mostly do anything on my computer already, it has little trouble with CLI or computer use) and more to do with cost. If cost wasn't an issue, I'd just pay the full price for a full seat.
The differentiation, experimentation etc. comes after.
I almost wonder if this is a place where SpaceX, as an internet provider through starlink, has a unique advantage because websites are unable to block their networking as it could be residential starlink consumers.
I run Hermes on a VPS, and the website was blocking its IP. I gave it a reverse SSH tunnel to a remote-debugging Chrome profile on my local Mac and now it works fine.
i feel like there's an obvious advantage if your agent can work truly in the background
I would like to introduce the Grok Box
The core is there. But there is some work to be done to have a nicer shell and all, which I’m currently focusing on.
However, no OpenAI API support (just Anthropic + openai.com) means I can’t use it for either.
Otherwise, I think this would still go into my "I don't get it" folder. It seems like the flavor of the day is "agents can talk to each other" and Grok Bot is selling that point along with Claude Code. But I think Pi has had this for a while? Or it was easy to wire it in.
As it's linked to an SMTP gateway I interact with it entirely by email. It also has API keys for my internal bug tracker, it has its own git forks of my repos and so on.
Over time it's improved itself so it has adaptive wakeups, a nice monitoring dashboard so I can see what it's doing if I want, a bunch of skills, a nightly wakeup to reorganize its home directories and so on. It keeps a private knowledge base in its home dir and writes its own skills, and it has a persistent todo list. When the todo list is populated it wakes up more frequently so it can break work up into chunks, a kind of basic Ralph loop.
I've found this email-centric paradigm works pretty nicely for me compared to just running a local CLI agent. For instance, I can assign a bug to "Axiom" (it named itself) in YouTrack and the email notification causes it to wake up and start work on the bug. If it gets blocked, it uses its API key to post a comment back to the ticket. If I think of something I just quickly email it, so I'm using Gmail instead of dealing with finicky ChatGPT style UIs that don't have good support for labelling, compact UI and other nice things.
On older models its judgement about what to work on wasn't that good, but with the latest GPTs it's doing much better. I just got back from holiday and it had triaged and resolved over 25 different bugs, a nice selection too.
Because the whole thing runs in a dedicated UNIX user account it is able to modify its own configuration, which has helped as I developed this setup.
However, based on the blog post, Grok Bot sounds a fair bit more sophisticated. I haven't felt a need for more than one bot as I can't easily saturate even a single bot.
Cost: just uses my regular ChatGPT Plus subscription, $20/month, plus of course the server it runs on (which is shared with lots of other stuff). I'm not working with it heavily, perhaps if I did I'd need the $200/month sub.
Either way, I still don't think that computer use is solved. It worked horribly on Codex and Antigravity the last time I tried. Maybe I was doing something wrong.