42 comments

  • danielrmay21 hours ago
    Interesting to see they shipped an &quot;anti-slop&quot; taste skill:<p>&gt; description: Anti-slop frontend skill for landing pages, portfolios, and redesigns. The agent reads the brief, infers the right design direction, and ships interfaces that do not look templated. Real design systems when applicable, audit-first on redesigns, strict pre-flight check.<p>&gt; - *PREMIUM-CONSUMER PALETTE BAN (mandatory, second-most-recurring AI-tell):* - For premium-consumer briefs (cookware, wellness, artisan, luxury, heritage craft, DTC home goods, etc.)... - Backgrounds: `#f5f1ea`, `#f7f5f1`...<p>&gt; Landing pages and portfolios are *visual products*. Text-only pages with fake-screenshot divs are slop.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yc-software&#x2F;qm&#x2F;blob&#x2F;7f2c916360f1797a8ff2a77ce2ce40c5fabab087&#x2F;skills-seed&#x2F;taste-skill&#x2F;references&#x2F;tasteskill.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yc-software&#x2F;qm&#x2F;blob&#x2F;7f2c916360f1797a8ff2a...</a>
    • nojs17 hours ago
      &gt; Em-dash (—) is COMPLETELY banned. It is the LLM&#x27;s signature stylistic crutch and it is the #1 visual Tell in production tests. There is no &quot;limited use&quot; allowance, no &quot;natural language frequency&quot; allowance, no &quot;in body copy is fine&quot; allowance. None.<p>I guess the em dash is really dead.
      • vidarh7 hours ago
        Probably not, because now you&#x27;ll have all of the people who are worried about this ensuring their AI generated text never ever uses em-dashes, and then <i>that</i> will be the new tell.<p>Or we can just be more concerned with whether something is well written and well presented and accept that sometimes that is going to be AI written text.
        • abustamam2 hours ago
          My personal &quot;tell&quot; is that I use -- instead of em-dash. If you get a message from me with an actual &quot;—&quot; character it&#x27;s almost certainly AI generated.<p>I guess that&#x27;s kind of my duress code :)
        • jurgenburgen1 hour ago
          &gt; Or we can just be more concerned with whether something is well written and well presented and accept that sometimes that is going to be AI written text.<p>Slop is slop, it doesn’t matter if it was human or LLM written. If a code comment or Slack message is 200 words long but still makes no fucking sense then it’s slop. A message can be 10 words long and riddled with typos but if the message is understandable it’s not slop.
      • brucehoult8 hours ago
        I&#x27;ve been posting my writing on the internet since 1990, from a Mac where we all learned how to make en and em dashes, umlauts, accents, degree symbols, proper single and double quotes, and so forth from Day #1 and I have absolutely no plans to stop using em dashes.
        • brookst4 hours ago
          Nice try, ChatGPT.<p>Though I agree with GP: models and harnesses are being updated so hard to avoid any use of em-dashes that soon it will be a tell of human writing. The the pendulum will swing back and forth, forever.
      • dgunay16 hours ago
        I have been seeing people use it more who I am fairly confident are not otherwise using AI to write public-facing communications. It&#x27;s almost like there&#x27;s a minor movement to try and reclaim it. Either that or it&#x27;s somehow getting past my AIdar.
      • animuchan3 hours ago
        This quote is so egregiously stupid, I&#x27;m instantly disinterested in this product now. No reason to assume the rest isn&#x27;t the same applied cretinism as the quoted sentence.
      • rpdillon12 hours ago
        It&#x27;s notable that this appears to be used to generate frontends that look more authentic than the typical AI generated site, not as a test for what&#x27;s acceptable from a human contributor.
      • matheusmoreira11 hours ago
        I suppose all the exotic unicode characters are dead now. Anything that&#x27;s too annoying for a human to type but trivial for AI to generate is probably done for. I used to enjoy using those characters. Sigh.
        • brucehoult8 hours ago
          They have never been annoying to type on a Mac.
      • dlopes712 hours ago
        And yet they use it on the README
    • postalcoder9 hours ago
      All due respect to the YC folks, but having a skill with 22,069 tokens is a major skill issue. Yes, ironic.<p>My slop control skill is a thousand tokens. Biggest problem I see with the skill is that everything is prompted via negativa. smh. sorry to be judgmental but it&#x27;s hard to trust a harness that comes shipped with a skill like this.
      • nylonstrung2 hours ago
        Gary is no Paul Graham, technically speaking
      • CuriouslyC3 hours ago
        The YC folks know engineering hype, not engineering. Most of them have been out of the game so long and focused on other things they&#x27;ve forgotten their fundamentals. You can hear this explicitly in shit Gary says in a lot of videos, it&#x27;s directionally correct but detached from fundamentals.
    • hmokiguess2 hours ago
      According to the license, the source of it is actually this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tasteskill.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tasteskill.dev&#x2F;</a><p>Which, in my opinion, feels like slop.
    • thoughtpeddler21 hours ago
      Doesn’t this just lead to a new “basin of tastelessness” that, sure, looks different from current slop, but is itself just eventually slop all the same?
      • namuol20 hours ago
        So just an accelerated version of the standard UI design trends cycle (which is bad).
      • brianjking15 hours ago
        Yes.
    • bellowsgulch1 hour ago
      They all use the same pill glowy status light header eyebrow to immediately tell you they have no actual design skills and follow the herd.<p>Posers took over the industry.
    • throwatdem123111 hour ago
      lol this is hilarious - the “make no mistakes” of design<p>You can’t prompt an agent to have taste.
  • cyanregiment2 hours ago
    Why does every online software say they are &quot;multiplayer&quot; now?<p>And then like 90% of the time there&#x27;s nobody &quot;there&quot;, and it&#x27;s barely even collaborative.<p>If this is &quot;multiplayer&quot;, does that make Chrome a Massively Multiplayer Online Browser?<p>Is everything a game?
    • krishna1802 hours ago
      Lol. That&#x27;s a good humour.
  • bfeynman3 hours ago
    Can someone give me an example where this is truly and uniquely useful? I&#x27;ve seen so many of these things and I can&#x27;t tell if part of it is like mostly for enabling nontechnical folks to do more things or if it&#x27;s some unlock and additive value. At end of day beneath it all things are just prompts, and then you can provide tools and context, but even then that&#x27;s not even something I&#x27;ve found that useful to keep because context windows are still limited and bias propagations often need to be constantly corrected, especially when digital artifacts are not perfect representations of the real world.
    • dbmikus2 hours ago
      [dead]
    • sheepscreek2 hours ago
      It gives every employee their own personal assistant (AI agent). It learns their preferences, and more importantly, can access whatever they can.
      • nylonstrung2 hours ago
        And what aspect of that is novel exactly?
        • sheepscreek37 minutes ago
          I didn’t imply it was novel.
  • hmokiguess2 hours ago
    So that explains why there is so much low effort cold outreach on LinkedIn from YC founders these days.<p>It&#x27;s getting ridiculous the amount of unsupervised agents doing active inbox management on things that should be personal relationship work. I&#x27;m so tired of it.
  • knighthacker21 hours ago
    Love seeing this direction along with Buzz.<p>The hardest problem in multiplayer agents, at least for us, has not been the agent loop. It is scoping and QM&#x27;s per-person scopes plus shared rooms is a sane answer for a company-wide assistant.<p>I build in the adjacent lane, AQ (aq.dev), a multiplayer coding harness where teams run Claude Code and Codex together), so seeing YC ship &quot;a multiplayer agent harness for work&quot; is validating and a little surreal.
  • saadn922 hours ago
    Pretty cool - I’ve also been doing something along the lines of this with lumifyhub but it includes docs and boards natively
  • yewenjie22 hours ago
    Is Hermes the best openclaw like agent as they mention running it before?<p>Also, what are power uses really using openclaw like systems for?
    • supermdguy22 hours ago
      Still figuring it out, but it&#x27;s been really convenient to have an always-on agent that has access to internal systems and can be triggered by webhooks. Some examples of what we use it for:<p>- automatically fixing simple CI failures<p>- getting production alerts and automatically creating RCAs and a fix PR<p>- periodically checking slow DB queries and finding ways to speed them up.<p>- creating charts to answer one-off questions about our data<p>I&#x27;ve tried using it as an on-the-go coding agent as well, but found I prefer more interactive agents, so I can see what the code looks like.
      • stephenway21 hours ago
        I think the interesting challenge isn’t running agents, it’s reviewing their work. The more code agents produce, the more important provenance, review ergonomics, and trust become. I also suspect repository platforms will need to evolve there over the next few years.
      • nozzlegear18 hours ago
        &gt; <i>periodically checking slow DB queries and finding ways to speed them up.</i><p>How does this work in practice?
        • jaggederest14 hours ago
          At least for me, I have a couple dozen years of DB experience but robot, given performance metrics, can get really close to optimal on a tactical level (single query or pattern of queries) but can&#x27;t yet do the full normalize&#x2F;denormalize level of improvements without supervision. But really solid if you have one misbehaving query and give it explain analyze access on a read only account
    • backscratches22 hours ago
      Hermes is huge and packed with features you probably don&#x27;t need. I prefer smaller one I can extend as necessary, there are so many on github now and it is fun to test them but have been impressed with dirge (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dirge-code&#x2F;dirge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dirge-code&#x2F;dirge</a>) not affiliated.<p>I have one reading my second tier RSS feeds and newsletters and giving me news&#x2F;market updates filtered for things important to me
      • ArvidSu20 hours ago
        I&#x27;m not contradicting this but offering a contrast, I like Hermes because it simultaneously lowers barrier of entry and shows you what possibilities are unlocked by agents. I don&#x27;t think I would have the time, interest or creativity to jump into the deep end by either extending an existing harness or rolling my own from the start. This also isn&#x27;t an argument for doing just that, I might do so in the future, but critically only after Hermes has shown me what&#x27;s possible and my preferences are developed.
        • backscratches19 hours ago
          I completely agree. I started with aichat[0] before the current agent trend and hit all kinds of bumps implementing agentic loops on my own. Then goose[1] showed me what a whole team working toward the same idea could do right before the official Claude Code harness which had all the bells and whistles. Now I know better what I want and its mostly less ram usage and a small set of primitives.<p>I still use Claude code (and codex and other big contenders) because they know what they are doing and innovate in ways I don&#x27;t want to miss. And sometimes they are better at tasks.<p>[0]: 2023, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sigoden&#x2F;aichat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sigoden&#x2F;aichat</a> [1]: 2024, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aaif-goose&#x2F;goose" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aaif-goose&#x2F;goose</a>
      • tomjuggler7 hours ago
        I feel the same but my preference is for Cecli (cecli.dev)<p>It does what I need it to do and since I invested so much time in setting it up and even contributing to development it is my go to for coding and even managing my VPS as well as business tasks
      • nisegami22 hours ago
        I had the same line of thought and spent a while with nanoclaw before realizing that adding the features I want back in would have made future updates too painful. I ended up switching to Hermes and aggressively disabling tools&#x2F;skills and it&#x27;s been pretty fine so far. I got more use cases set up than I did in my time with nanoclaw.
        • backscratches19 hours ago
          Totally fair, I still use Claude code for tasks since it is so polished. I think I just dont have that complicated of use cases so in the end performance should reflect my lightweight needs as the priority.
    • joshstrange20 hours ago
      Hermes is what I was using but I still found it annoying I often wanted to operate 1-2 levels deeper.<p>Yesterday I just decided to try writing my own version (100% just for me, not open source, no monetization plan, incredibly custom) and I&#x27;ve been enjoying working on it so far (I know, I know, it&#x27;s been a day, honeymoon period and all that).<p>Part of it is I like building software (even if I&#x27;m not writing every line) and part is I like having full control. Turns out (and many people have said this) the basic agent loop really isn&#x27;t all that special. There are a million levers to pull and what not outside the base loop but that the fun part for me. Trying out different ways to add on to the core concept.<p>I&#x27;m really enjoying being untethered for things like &quot;how will I monetize?&quot; or &quot;how do I make this generic so others can use it?&quot;. If I need functionality I just add it in, I don&#x27;t need to make it infinitely pluggable, etc.<p>All that said, I&#x27;m thankful to things like nanoclaw and then Hermes for exposing me to the core ideas. I just want to put my own spin on it.
    • nylonstrung2 hours ago
      I think Hermes is a kitchen sink of antipatterns and bloat, which is true of the vast majority of these &quot;Claws&quot;
    • azuanrb22 hours ago
      I&#x27;m currently using it to help me with my oncall, first responder to our any production alerts. It&#x27;s not as efficient as coding agent by default, but it&#x27;s been tremendously helpful to me.
    • fassssst22 hours ago
      I think most people use it to poll their email and instant messages and whateva with an LLM
    • weirdish22 hours ago
      hermes is great to get started with, but it&#x27;s packed to the gills with stuff you&#x27;ll probably use one time just to test it. and this eats in to your context so if you&#x27;re hoping to run it on a lighter-weight local model you&#x27;ll run in to some trouble. if you go into it planning to customize&#x2F;thin it out it&#x27;s solid
    • noodlescb21 hours ago
      Honestly the limitations&#x2F;security of it kind of made it a novelty for me. I use web hosted stuff like surfboard now for my llm-assistant work stuff.
  • luciana1u18 hours ago
    I gave an agent its own Slack channel and it started scheduling meetings with other agents without me. I&#x27;ve never felt more like middle management
    • eru10 hours ago
      I hope the other agents replied with &#x27;This meeting could have been an email.&#x27;
  • recsv-heredoc19 hours ago
    Aren&#x27;t there a ton of products already doing this? Why not just use claude Cowork? Surely they&#x27;re simpler&#x2F;better&#x2F;more featureful&#x2F;developed than the alternatives here? What advantage does this have? Would love to see a &#x27;QM vs Cowork&#x27; comparison!
    • walrus0119 hours ago
      &gt; Why not just use claude Cowork?<p>Because people want to be able to do things like use their own clients of pi or opencode with LLMs they run themselves, such as the just released deepseek v4 flash 0731, not permanently tied to an Anthropic ecosystem of non-open-weight LLMs and pay forever per token.
    • lukasco5 hours ago
      &gt; Would love to see a &#x27;QM vs Cowork&#x27; comparison!<p>It feels like the big thing they are touting here is the shared company brain. Not clear to me though, how that brain is developed when each person has their own harness. (I did only skim the docs.)<p>And it still has the issue of: if the agent is acting as me, then security wise it can do anything I can do. Maybe that&#x27;s why they are recommending for startups.<p>But yes, comparison would be helpful.
    • nozzlegear18 hours ago
      &gt; <i>Why not just use claude Cowork?</i><p>Many people don&#x27;t want to support a company pushing for regulatory capture.
      • browningstreet14 hours ago
        Check the speakers at the startup school that happened just last weekend…
    • bellowsgulch1 hour ago
      People are building state-of-the-art harnesses in private right now that outperform the average developers&#x27; harnesses, people using Claude Code, OpenCode, etc.
    • kang19 hours ago
      this one is trying to cashin on the &#x27;multiplayer&#x27; keyword after the buzz that &#x27;no one has cracked multiplayer yet&#x27;. well the ui sucks and is not it.
      • recsv-heredoc19 hours ago
        Kinda makes sense. Multiplayer is at odds with async, generally speaking - and LLMs&#x2F;agents really see their productivity rise up with async work.
        • samtheprogram13 hours ago
          I disagree with this. If agents are doing asynchronous work, it&#x27;s really an artifact anyone should be able to look at.
      • andersonpico18 hours ago
        what does multiplayer means in this context?
    • omederos19 hours ago
      maybe you want to use a different model?
  • epistasis21 hours ago
    It&#x27;s fascinating to see new UI primitives and concepts get invented in the LLM era. The sea of creativity makes it hard to even understand most of what each new app does, and nobody describes them well. When I went to the Hermes agent web page, I was left with <i>zero</i> clue about what it did or what it could do. It took a bit of digging to find the right part of the qm page that helped me grok what was going on.<p>I&#x27;ve become attached to Orca (yc-backed) for managing coding sessions in the past week, but some sort of postgres session db is what&#x27;s really lacking. So, maybe it&#x27;s time to try qm.
    • papascrubs19 hours ago
      It is fascinating and I love to see it. Ultimately though, why not build your own? I think that in part is what we&#x27;re beginning to see-- highly customized and personalized software. I take most of these as inspiration these days and just build my own. Nothing you can&#x27;t hammer out with a few good Claude sessions.
      • 2001zhaozhao18 hours ago
        But why build your own from scratch when you can do it on top one extensible UI platform that already has all of your organizational context, not to mention coding agents already built-in that you can just tell it to build &amp; deploy your personalized workflow softwaree from scratch? ;-)
        • customguy5 hours ago
          Because it&#x27;s fun! I don&#x27;t &quot;really&quot; use LLM for anything serious yet, but after discovering playing with a custom harness I licked blood. Like going back to edit any message to start a new conversation branch off that, or being able to go back and remove things that turned out to to be dead ends from the history. Not really &quot;useful&quot; [0] for now, I always wondered about that and I was dumbfounded how trivial and tiny a first MVP was. Of course, that&#x27;s also because it <i>is</i> trivial, it&#x27;s just chat, it affords none of the usefulness you&#x27;d want for any &quot;work&quot;, but it&#x27;s still very interesting.<p>And for some simple recurring tasks or local housekeeping stuff, having something where I 100% know what files it reads or writes will surely be useful. E.g. if I wanted to watch out for certain topics on HN, I&#x27;d rather make something myself that grabs the feed and turns that into a list of titles and topic ID, which is probably 1% of what the front page HTML would be, and then only have the LLM process that output -- rather than telling an LLM to do all that every time. Even if tokens may not be <i>that</i> precious, and the difference in &quot;cognitive performance&quot; not worth speaking of, that would feel way neater to me.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;ZL8dhYg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;ZL8dhYg</a>
        • papascrubs17 hours ago
          That&#x27;s an option right? When I say roll your own-- it could be extending another platform. There&#x27;s definitely different levels. Customization is in reach regardless of where you want to start and stop your stack.
      • epistasis15 hours ago
        Why not build my own? Because my good ideas are in other areas, and I&#x27;m going to expend my energies where they have the most impact.<p>I&#x27;ve replaced most of my business software that I was paying for with custom stuff, already, for busy-LLM-work.<p>I am but a leaf riding on top of the sea of creativity of others when it comes to these new interaction patterns.
      • jauntywundrkind19 hours ago
        These new experiences are built atop layers and layers of bedrock libraries that we, generally, don&#x27;t reinvent. Or we reinvent one or two.<p>What&#x27;s notable to me is that ux doesn&#x27;t so far generally have this behavior. That as per this post people just build a new app, a new experience.<p>I want to believe over time we&#x27;ll have better composable &amp; malleable ux experiences atop broader platforms for us. That over time the &quot;go it alone&quot; path has other worth ways to innovate that use a more substantial shared base. It&#x27;s dangerous to go it alone, and doing so equipped with just our wooden sword and some courage and perhaps an LLM wisp is an amazing adventure, but I think the survival rate &amp; impact would be much better if we had more general ux systems that supported better innovation atop them, and if less people did the pure &quot;why not build your own&quot; path.
        • papascrubs17 hours ago
          I understand you take. And I definitely agree that we could use a lot better ux tools than we have right now. Maybe one of these prototypes will lead to that though. I&#x27;ll look at it more as creative engineering. Not everything is meant to be distributed or consumed. But that doesn&#x27;t mean that it&#x27;s not worthwhile to try and prototype different flows and options. I have seen hundreds of harnesses, I&#x27;ve only used a couple-- but they&#x27;ve inspired me to build something that fits me better and works for me. If somebody comes out with something that helps unify the UX experience and provides better building blocks for me to work with, I&#x27;ll definitely switch to that and rebuild my experience on top of that. But for now this is what we have. Admittedly this reflects my level of experience and my expertise too. I don&#x27;t have a lot of experience working with building UX frameworks, so I adapt what I can.
        • duderific17 hours ago
          People are using the UX systems though, just that it&#x27;s the agent that is gluing them together now. Under the hood, it&#x27;s still React plus component libraries like shadcn, lucide, tailwind, axios and so on.<p>The agents are so good at this, there&#x27;s literally no point in not doing it that way.
          • jauntywundrkind14 hours ago
            These are all surface veneer but so so so much less than an app. The entire rest of the owl has to be redrawn, and all the guts inside the owl redesigned.
        • jaggederest17 hours ago
          UX does have this, and it has for many years. You might remember Bootstrap way back in the day, and everything looking like bootstrap. These days it seems like everything is based on tailwind under the hood.<p>Right now shadcn&#x2F;ui might be the leading candidate but there are plenty including old school bootstrap, material &#x2F; MUI, a bunch of various flat-themed ui, etc. They often come in the form of a react component library or whatever but they&#x27;re generally really solid. I also found one in svelte that I can&#x27;t immediately pull up but it was nice looking too.
    • 2001zhaozhao20 hours ago
      It&#x27;s really hard to focus on the unique aspect of your tool because it runs the risk that people will think it&#x27;s unfamiliar and therefore not useful to them. That&#x27;s why a lot of the tool marketing pages look the same even though the tools themselves might be different or innovative
    • j4521 hours ago
      AI needs entirely new primitives in many areas.
      • jesol21 hours ago
        I think we need a new area of study around UI&#x2F;Agent connection. It can kinda be done with tools, but I&#x27;d we need much deeper primitives to allow the UI to inform the Agent and vice-versa. Right now we&#x27;ve just given up, replacing the UI with an Agent message view, but I think that&#x27;s just because nobody is thinking about how the two can compliment each other<p>I&#x27;ve been playing around with using a hidden markov model informed by a UI state event stream, with the end state fed into the Agent as a hint on each message turn. Then the Agent can make a tool call to add events to the HMM. This has been really interesting, but I haven&#x27;t struck the right balance to make it actually feel good for the user yet
        • throwaway778317 hours ago
          Isn&#x27;t this the direction Claude on the web is going towards? It&#x27;s a mix of message view on the left and specific interactive UI on the right panel. There is also MCP Apps spec now
      • jychang20 hours ago
        It&#x27;s hard to say what is needed now, vs needed in a few years.<p>For example, many rumors say SSI has solved learning and retaining state. That would significantly change AI requirements.
  • cretinoid4 hours ago
    qm has been a qemu (virtualization) command line tool probably for 20 years or so. The ignorance of these people inside the same field is egregious. (Oh, yes, there can be tools that are named the same in the same field, I get it)
  • buremba14 hours ago
    I love the concept to use different harness frameworks in qm but a true multiplayer harness needs to support other agents and any MCP clients, including Cowork.<p>Making agents multiplayer is mostly a context problem. You could be using ChatGPT or a Slack bot, or a web interface and the agent needs to know you, your conversations in Cowork etc. so it can enable multi channel collaboration with your agents and your colleagues. We&#x27;re working on it at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lobu.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lobu.ai</a>
  • sudb17 hours ago
    This was literally in YC&#x27;s Request For Startups for Fall 2026: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;rfs#multiplayer-ai">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;rfs#multiplayer-ai</a>
  • yohamta10 hours ago
    Multiplayer agent harness is useful only when the context and AI output does not overwhelm the team space and works asynchronously and background. If you think about it, that could be just boring job scheduler, isn&#x27;t it?
  • kevinwang22 hours ago
    What is yc software?
    • Finbarr18 hours ago
      A team of brilliant people who work at YC shipping products internally and externally.
      • leonvoss24 minutes ago
        &gt;brilliant
      • gyanchawdhary15 hours ago
        A team that pioneered writing small checks for outsized returns. AI is making that venture model a lot less attractive, so now they&#x27;re building productivity software for the startups they once only invested in.
    • dwedge22 hours ago
      I think it&#x27;s the website you&#x27;re on
    • rytill22 hours ago
      Someone from Y Combinator made some software. Must there be narrativization of everything?
      • epistasis21 hours ago
        Yes, please!<p>I&#x27;d like to know more, for example why now?
        • rytill21 hours ago
          At least for me, I often have a hard time believing people’s stated reasons for whatever they’re doing.<p>The substance &lt;&gt; narrative relationship is backwards a lot of the time. Someone does something for a nebulous multitude of reasons, and then post-hoc fits their decision-making into a logical explanation that sounds nice.<p>There is some psychology research supporting this as well.<p>I suppose if you see the narrative itself as part of the release, that might be interesting. But most of the time I’d rather just hear plainly and straightforwardly what the thing is.<p>Or at the very least, I am very accepting of releases which do not include rationalization &#x2F; narrativization and don’t think it’s required to include.
  • a-dub3 hours ago
    i&#x27;m curious what this gains in practice and usability over standard chatbot slack integration.
  • mellosouls17 hours ago
    In a tangential earlier release, Gary Tan&#x27;s own gstack:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garrytan&#x2F;gstack" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garrytan&#x2F;gstack</a><p><i>Use Garry Tan&#x27;s exact Claude Code setup: 23 opinionated tools that serve as CEO, Designer, Eng Manager, Release Manager, Doc Engineer, and QA</i>
    • smartbit5 hours ago
      <i>YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48815117">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48815117</a> (July 5, 2026)
    • Planktonne4 hours ago
      This is the exact same as the breathless faddishness of celebrity news. &quot;Use these seventeen different skincare products and you&#x27;ll look exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow&quot;.
  • wxw21 hours ago
    &gt; We take contributions as human-written text, not code — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Describe the change you&#x27;d like informally in a .txt or .md file in adrs&#x2F;, and if we&#x27;re aligned we&#x27;ll handle the implementation.<p>Interesting approach to open source contributions. Closer to feature requests at that point?
  • 2001zhaozhao20 hours ago
    I&#x27;ll need to explore how they&#x27;re doing org wide context and security for sure. This seems extremely complementary to my own coding tool which currently gives the best AI interface for individuals.<p>Would be cool if in a few epic tickets i&#x27;ll have both their org wide architecture AND a productive individual coding interface :)
  • aatd8620 hours ago
    If I had applied to yc, I would have thought they had &quot;distilled&quot; my startup idea xD
    • qup19 hours ago
      It&#x27;s not very novel
      • aatd8617 hours ago
        Ok but then why did they ask for this in a Request For Startups?
  • smolder6 hours ago
    Fake, boring, non-accomplishment.
  • josht22 hours ago
    looks like an internal tool that yc rushed out the door to minimize any most lost ground to Buzz. That said, I&#x27;d be curious what folks think comparing these two tools.
  • bigwhite8 hours ago
    The design concepts of “qm” and “Block Buzz” share some similarities in their underlying principles.
  • argssh22 hours ago
    it says &quot;Each deployment runs in the operator&#x27;s own cloud account&quot;<p>But feels like its written to run on one mac&#x2F;vm and carries same drawbacks of other similar platforms. I&#x27;d rather use Hermes&#x2F;Openclaw for oss or closed managed agents like Tasklet or Prajvis
  • bigbuppo17 hours ago
    Oh sweet, nice to see someone writing about multivalue databases.
  • hankbond20 hours ago
    Just want to thank the authors for the concise and consumable README.
  • tclancy20 hours ago
    &gt; Learn your writing voice from past sends, then triage your inbox on a schedule — labels and reply drafts included<p>Oh grand. The world will be full of agents talking to agents and nothing getting done. So pretty much the same only I can just leave my machine awake to look busy.
  • john_strinlai22 hours ago
    i find something a bit funny in an ai project, written by ai, requiring human-written text with specific guidance to not use ai.<p>&quot;<i>Given that coding agents write most underlying code now, we&#x27;d prefer PRs in the form of human-written text. [...] Please do not have AI artificially expand what you&#x27;d like to do into a formal proposal.</i>&quot;
    • sigbottle22 hours ago
      XY problem, don&#x27;t expand the design doc before you have the idea for the design. Don&#x27;t compile down into lower abstraction levels until necessary
    • 2001zhaozhao20 hours ago
      i think it makes perfect sense and I&#x27;ll probably adopt the same posture for my open source project.<p>The idea is that the core dev team is the one with the AI harness. If someone contributes an idea they can just feed it to their AI to implement it and it probably costs 10 minutes of human time, because they trust that their harness will be able to implement the feature competently.<p>So, because the implementation effort is so low, the only aspect that matters if the quality of the idea. It&#x27;s way easier to screen human written text than a bunch of code in a PR. If you just give them code, they would not know if you made it with a competent harness. If you gave them a AI written design they would have a lot more to read through to decide whether it&#x27;s slop. If you just give them an idea it&#x27;s a lot easier to determine whether it&#x27;s high quality.
    • stefan_21 hours ago
      Yet the README is generated (&quot;Two skills maintain the boundary in both directions.&quot;) and the demo is .. a Mobius strip?<p>I&#x27;d prefer if you explain what it is you are building in the form of human-written text.
      • jaggederest21 hours ago
        Well, if they&#x27;re consistent, the ADR directory contains only human written text that drives the underlying development... Aaand it&#x27;s empty. Well.<p>I personally would probably have the readme generated based on that directory as the primary document, probably with another `readme_generation_rules.md` in the ADRs directory, and I would be pretty ruthless about disallowing all the slop-adjacent wording.
        • titanomachy20 hours ago
          &gt; I would be pretty ruthless about disallowing all the slop-adjacent wording.<p>I’d think that trying to play whack-a-mole with slop like that would result in a lengthy prompt, as well as being brittle to future changes.<p>If you want the prompt to be the source of truth, you’re probably going to have to accept prose that feels like AI, at least until you can regenerate with some future smarter model.
          • jaggederest17 hours ago
            Not even close :) It&#x27;s really, really good at making natural-sounding prose if you demand it, set clear guidelines (ideally a script it can run with grading, but...), Fable in particular is eerie about mimicking prose style. Try RFC style if you want really clear architecture documents with MUST&#x2F;SHOULD etc.<p>It will, of course, be slightly worse at the non-style task (i.e. make the readme worse), but if you care about the style, that&#x27;s probably an acceptable tradeoff.
    • ronsor22 hours ago
      Coding agents are extremely useful but often extremely dumb with design. If you do not design the software yourself, you will probably get slop. This was always the core issue with vibe coding.
      • j4522 hours ago
        AI Averages, and is inclined to do average designs and implementations, which in some cases might be an improvement, but long term it creates more to deal with.
        • bityard22 hours ago
          Hm. If &quot;AI averages,&quot; then why doesn&#x27;t it create an average amount to deal with, instead of more?
          • ronsor22 hours ago
            Because competent people are evaluating it. In places where the standards are rock-bottom, the AI is leagues ahead of anything they&#x27;d produce normally.
          • freeone300021 hours ago
            Because the “average” developer is incompetent.
    • warkdarrior22 hours ago
      They specifically ask not to create&#x2F;submit a formal proposal. I do not see any restriction on the use of AI otherwise.
      • john_strinlai22 hours ago
        i read the emphasized &quot;<i>human-written</i>&quot; part, in combination with that last line, as a blanket restriction (for contributing). but perhaps i read it wrong.
        • embedding-shape22 hours ago
          List of commits already include at least two contributors who are openly working with Claude on their code: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yc-software&#x2F;qm&#x2F;commits&#x2F;main&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yc-software&#x2F;qm&#x2F;commits&#x2F;main&#x2F;</a>
        • tptacek19 hours ago
          The point is that they just want your prompts, not your code.
          • john_strinlai18 hours ago
            yes, specifically they want purely <i>human-written</i> ones.<p>i understand why they want their own agent to do the code, and i can see the reasoning behind it. but not allowing ai to format&#x2F;tidy up&#x2F;flesh out the proposal is the part that i thought was a little funny.
            • tptacek18 hours ago
              It&#x27;s definitely a little bit funny. I think it&#x27;s a good and interesting rule though!
    • petesergeant20 hours ago
      That&#x27;s not surprising. I have much the same thing in my latest open-source work[0]. I have a workflow that&#x27;s working nicely with agents, it&#x27;s more of a pain to review someone else&#x27;s code than it is to get a well-written description of their problem.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pjlsergeant&#x2F;byre?tab=contributing-ov-file" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pjlsergeant&#x2F;byre?tab=contributing-ov-file</a>
  • m46320 hours ago
    not a very helpful title? maybe: &quot;qm - a multiplayer agent harness for work&quot;
    • tptacek19 hours ago
      It&#x27;s an HN-ism that it&#x27;s OK for titles to make readers do a little work.
  • Kevcmk14 hours ago
    This is smelling like an astroturfing campaign. This is a total nothing-burger
  • kurtis_reed15 hours ago
    &quot;multiplayer&quot;? Is this a game? I honestly don&#x27;t know what that means in this context.
  • moralestapia22 hours ago
    Sweet, now YC itself will be the startup :D.
  • Drupon22 hours ago
    &gt;We take contributions as human-written text, not code — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Describe the change you&#x27;d like informally in a .txt or .md file in adrs&#x2F;, and if we&#x27;re aligned we&#x27;ll handle the implementation. Report vulnerabilities privately — see SECURITY.md, not a public issue.<p>Starting to think people were right when they talked about our industry itself having an AI psychosis problem.
    • jez22 hours ago
      SQLite has a conceptually similar contribution process:<p>&gt; the project does not accept patches from random people on the internet<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sqlite.org&#x2F;copyright.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sqlite.org&#x2F;copyright.html</a><p>In their case, it&#x27;s motivated by a desire to keep copyrighted code out of the SQLite implementation, but I&#x27;m sure it has a nice benefit of making it so that an extremely widely used project doesn&#x27;t get drive by, low effort code review requests while still allowing the community to engage.<p>Asking that &quot;random people on the internet&quot; don&#x27;t sent code is not altogether a novel, post-AI idea.
    • bityard22 hours ago
      As someone who has maintained an open source project, I much prefer written bug reports and feature requests to drive-by PRs. (I almost don&#x27;t even care if they are LLM-written.)
      • dwedge21 hours ago
        I appreciate open source maintainers and understand that it&#x27;s a lot of thankless work, and I know what I&#x27;m about to say comes off as (and probably is) ignorant but the hoops projects make me jump through to report hugs or security issues is often like working for corporate in terms of bureaucracy and a lot of times I just don&#x27;t bother. I&#x27;ve reported a few dozen bugs so I&#x27;m not prolific here but also not speaking without any experience at all. And then you often have automation (eg. Debian) closing bugs because nobody looked at it and saying to reopen it if it&#x27;s still a problem in the current release.<p>Like I said, I do understand and appreciate how annoying it must be. But there are two ways to look at this, one is that it&#x27;s free software a bug report is like a support request - and of course nobody should expect free support. The other way to look at it is that by reporting bugs I&#x27;m volunteering as QA for the project and the report is beneficial.
      • epistasis21 hours ago
        I sometimes add a PR with the fix for a bug report I make, but the last few have been ignored in favor of the maintainer&#x27;s own code. So I think I&#x27;ll stop doing PRs and just point to code lines instead.
    • dgellow22 hours ago
      I tend to think we have an industry AI mania problem, but I’m not sure I understand what you find psychotic about this. I find it better to get a text suggestion or description of the change, then work on the implementation myself, even without using an agent, instead of reviewing LLM diffs that I know I will want to tweak to my taste
    • embedding-shape22 hours ago
      Sounds to me they&#x27;re asking people to basically at least put the starting stones to something that looks like a specification. Not a bad idea to gate the flurry of feature requests to people who actually can think 10-15 minutes about the feature they&#x27;re suggesting&#x2F;asking for.
    • meagher22 hours ago
      as a maintainer, seems nicer than getting a slop pr with no context.
    • cyanydeez22 hours ago
      the other option is to generate 5000+ open issues that no one cares are open.<p>Also, it&#x27;s a AI project; what, exactly, do you think they&#x27;re going to try and do?
    • bakugo22 hours ago
      So, basically,<p>&gt; Please write our prompts for us
  • gyanchawdhary15 hours ago
    this looks over engineered, gimmicky and lame. YC is clearly having a &quot;crisis of meaning&quot; in a post AI world
    • beambot15 hours ago
      This is (probably) a natural evolution of Garry&#x27;s gbrain, a basic RAG for individual use. Gbrain is super useful as a starting point for an individual; this seems like an extension to a company.<p>I&#x27;ve found gbrain to be very effective with meetily (instead of granola), vikunja for project planning, various mcp for email, etc. It&#x27;s nice not being locked in to vendors and models...<p>Thanks for making this OSS too.
    • kaonwarb15 hours ago
      Heavy conclusion from a single OSS release
  • rvz21 hours ago
    Other than the hosting providers, who has made money directly from running OpenClaw in constant loops?<p>This software appears to be yet another solution in search of a problem designed to burn as many tokens as possible.
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  • hn9rsvy2gx7 hours ago
    Real and useful, thanks
  • nico16 hours ago
    Cool. This also feels a lot like what copilot is doing. It’s nice that copilot integrates out of the box with teams&#x2F;outlook&#x2F;office, so it has great company&#x2F;work context