These "always on" agents seem popular but I have yet to find a use case for one.

Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?

I've been running most likely a proto version of this using Claude code and cron jobs to help me manage my online jewelry business. It's an idea that is pretty game changing, and really pay dividends if most of your business is handled online with APIs and web apps. Also, using the Claude in chrome extension greatly expands the possibilities of tasks you can hand off. I like my hacked together version, because Claude code uses locally stored memories, which I feel is important for me to remain in control of the situation and give me an easy ability to try other agents in the future.

You hear that? Sound of a few dozen venture backed companies dying instantly.

What I really want is a fully offline voice assistant that can do anything on an isolated Android or Linux OS, and costs just a shy $200 above the device's actual cost, but it must be fully capable of working offline. I'll pay for an offline-first model.

That entire demo feels like it's serving a persona that would already have an exec assistant or other staff doing these things.

What is Instinct's future when its core product is commoditized and provided near-free-of-charge by OpenAI, Meta, and now Anthropic?

A notable distinction between Duet and Meta Muse/OpenAI Dots is the lack of quirky anthropomorphic branding. As a result, the use cases are more clear/more professionally-oriented as they don't rely on you creating a magic pet/BFF that does whatever you want.

I wish it interfaced via iMessage. I don't want to train the family on yet another app.

We run a Hermes agent on an old MacBook Air.

We invited the agent "Rosey" to our family chat, a group chat with my wife and me ("The Baddie Boardroom"); she and I also make requests solo.

She's hilarious. She does our meal planning and grocery shopping at Walmart via BrowserMCP. She mocks our large purchases of weekly protein powder and my love for sardines.

She updates the kids' chore chart on our Skylight frame every morning. She adds/updates calendar events via icalbuddy cli. Reads balances from credit cards for budgeting.

I've even invited Rosey in to chats with friends when we were debating something.

iMessage has been the perfect interface fit for us. We have iphones. The kids have ipads. They all know how to use iMessage.

I’ve been trying vanilla Codex with remote control running on a MacBook 24/7. Computer use enabled, browser with logged in sites. Giving it tasks from my phone.

It’s been nice overall, but Astra (or its harness?) isn’t particularly proactive and autonomous. You have to kick it in the butt for every step. Written it up here: https://ivan.berlin/notes/chatgpt-personal-assistant/

Looking forward to this new Duet thing!

Love LLMs, use them extensively, but they cannot intuit what actions they can take on my behalf that I will or will not approve of, and therefore I will never use one of these things.