8 comments

  • trouve_search5 hours ago
    Does anyone here use Manus actively?<p>I found it worse than alternatives in the similar space (Claude, genspark, kagi research, etc.) and slightly baffling they were being acquired at a $2B valuation in the first place.
    • simonw5 hours ago
      ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren&#x27;t at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.
      • brazukadev4 hours ago
        In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don&#x27;t know anyone using it regularly and I&#x27;m in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.
        • ghshephard4 hours ago
          Claude CoWork absolutely dominates - I use it continuously now when connecting to mail, calendar, jira, google docs - any type of knowledge work. Almost everyone I know (at work) who does &quot;Knowledge work&quot; type stuff (as opposed to coding) uses it as their primary pane-of-glass now.<p>I have 15+ years of top 1 percentile knowledge using awk to process complex unstructured documents - and I don&#x27;t even bother anymore - just dump the dataset into CoWork and ask it to do the analysis, cross check its work.<p>I did it last night during a call for a reasonably complex 10,000 node cluster with all sorts of jobs&#x2F;allocations&#x2F;memory constraints. I didn&#x27;t even attempt to throw together a quick awk script (which would have taken me 7-8 minutes - it was a beast) - just did a nomad-job-inspect of a couple hundred jobs, and dumped all the data at CoWork (real time, while talking on the zoom) and said, &quot;Get me the Memory&#x2F;CPU requirements based on job&#x2F;datacenter&#x2F;SKU constraints and give me a summary Table&quot;.<p>Any normal person would have take 3-4 hours, minimum - futzing with google sheets and such (lots of task&#x2F;taskgroup independent counts). Even I would have taken a minimum of 10 minutes. Cowork had it for me in under 30 seconds - I didn&#x27;t even have to really look away from the zoom.<p>I haven&#x27;t use the Atlassian Jira interface to manage my sprints&#x2F;issues in 6+ weeks. All that cognitive drain is gone - I just ask CoWork to update the sprints, link issues to change-notices, comment and change status, set epics, etc... Zero need to find the damn field in Jira.<p>CoWork is legit.
          • riddlemethat1 hour ago
            Agreed. I split my work between Anthropic and OpenAI models but CoWork is deeply integrated into my workflows in compliance and project management. I can do more in a day with these tools than I did in a week before them and I have 20+ years of experience leading teams and building companies (even opened the NASDAQ once). It’s impossible to not be using these tools and still win in today’s world.
          • Dayshine3 hours ago
            How much does it cost? ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message; if Anthropic have a similar pricing model don&#x27;t you find lots of small changes and up fast?
            • lxgr3 hours ago
              &gt; ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message<p>For what kind of message are you seeing that kind of charge?
            • Computer01 hour ago
              $2 per message is certainly not my experience
            • stronglikedan1 hour ago
              It doesn&#x27;t cost <i>me</i> anything. No idea how much it costs the company though. ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯
            • simonw3 hours ago
              &quot;ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message&quot;?
          • michelb3 hours ago
            Simular stories. I work in an L&amp;D company with about 15 coworkers. I think most of us use Cowork&#x2F;Chatgpt Work almost fulltime. Haven’t used Word or Excel in two months other than to check or correct a bit of formatting from the AI. We now also go straight from Cowork to our CMS for finalizing. Tremendous timesavers but also better integration through our MCP. (AI is used for ideation, information research and writing the first version based on our guidelines. We finalize and&#x2F;or rewrite material in the CMS by hand. No AI to consumer without verification or editing)
          • mbrumlow3 hours ago
            I just do all that with Claude CLI :&#x2F;
          • FooBarWidget3 hours ago
            How do you have any kind of trust in these tools? They always feel like one prompt injection away, or one over eager agent away (&quot;I&#x27;ll lookup a forgotten credential in an email to ssh into a server to hack a system in order to fulfill your request&quot;), from disaster. I don&#x27;t trust any AI session unless I carefully select the exact files they have access to. No way do I dare sharing my entire mailbox.
          • smohare2 hours ago
            [dead]
        • csallen4 hours ago
          &gt; <i>In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don&#x27;t know anyone using it regularly and I&#x27;m in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.</i><p>I have lots of highly-educated knowledge worker friends who aren&#x27;t particularly techie but who swear by Claude Cowork.
        • simonw3 hours ago
          By &quot;established&quot; I meant more that they now exist as products and are being first developed. I agree that most people still don&#x27;t really understand what they are for - but I expect they already have way more exposure than Manus ever did.
        • primitivesuave4 hours ago
          My non-technical teammates use Claude Cowork extensively. We set up MCP servers to give them audited access to certain internal services, while they just have to think of MCP as a &quot;connector&quot; which they can configure in the GUI.
        • throw031720194 hours ago
          My accountant friend says it’s amazing (he does check the work but says it’s amazingly accurate).
          • grey-area4 hours ago
            This is deeply troubling.
            • ashdksnndck3 hours ago
              Maybe for the accountants! I have always done my own taxes, but used arcane custom spreadsheets that accumulated cruft each year. I told cowork to pretend it was an accountant and reorganize them using best practices, and the result is much better than what I had before. It also helped me complete a task I had been deferring for years (tracking down the history of money in my IRAs that had been transferred between different institutions, plus withdrawals conversions etc). Obviously I’m responsible for any errors Claude makes, but it seems to do a good job, and I don’t want to pay an accountant every year.
            • ldng1 hour ago
              Indeed, what could possibly go wrong ?
              • hluska59 minutes ago
                Considering that broken Excel formulas have killed off companies, the risk has already been priced in.
                • ldng35 minutes ago
                  We&#x27;ll see, crash will tell.
            • hluska59 minutes ago
              What’s troubling about it? Accounting is a huge space; many of which would be an excellent fit for an LLM. We’ll need specifics.
          • gamblor9562 hours ago
            As a counterpoint, the Accounting and Finance departments where I work are banned from using Cowork because it performed abysmally during a trial run.<p>To put things in perspective, humans with a 25% <i>lower</i> error rate than Cowork are pip&#x27;d and usually let go.<p>As with junior programmers and their love of vibe coding, I&#x27;ve found that anyone who thinks that AI tooling right now is &quot;amazing&quot; lacks the skills, knowledge, and&#x2F;or experience to know that it really isn&#x27;t.
            • hluska1 hour ago
              Your anecdote is not powerful enough to justify insulting groups of people like you just did.
    • meric_4 hours ago
      IMO I disagree. I find the built in harness (database, browser use, etc.) quite good.<p>The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you&#x27;re paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)
      • trouve_search4 hours ago
        Interesting, what does your tasks &amp; workflow look like with them?<p>I generally found the quality decent (say, similar to other competitors), but the speed of task completion was very slow. I think because they would depend too much on Sonnet as a core backend, and relied on big&#x2F;expensive models more than other harnesses.
    • jatins4 hours ago
      I found there Deep Research quite good in terms of browsing the web, better than Gemini&#x27;s. Though it blew through ~40$ in one task so it was very expensive, probably running at insane margins.
      • jrflowers1 hour ago
        What was the task that cost $40?
    • alansaber5 hours ago
      Valuations are significantly leveraged compared to actual user metrics. My impression of Manus was that, like Perplexity, some users were using it to get around firewalls&#x2F;regulation.
    • potato663 hours ago
      I use it alot. It&#x27;s great for like researching deep on a topic. I also accidentally found that it&#x27;s better at taking my directions and transferring that well to image generation especially with iteration. When I try my own iterations directly it never really lands
    • thm4 hours ago
      Too expensive &amp; unpredictable credit system.
  • econ5 hours ago
    Perhaps unfairly my interest suddenly dropped to zero when the acquisition was announced. The hype also seemed gone?
    • iamcoder185 hours ago
      Absolutely. Haven&#x27;t heard anyone talk about recently.
  • nylonstrung1 hour ago
    This has to be one of the most flash in the pan, 5 minutes of fame company in a long time<p>It&#x27;s crazy how short it&#x27;s hype cycle lasted
  • stephantul5 hours ago
    Anyone have info on whose regulatory restrictions they are referring to?
    • galaxy_quest5 hours ago
      The Chinese government blocked Meta’s acquisition.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;yFCIt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;yFCIt</a>
      • fg13712 minutes ago
        Interesting to know that Meta has business in China and needs the government&#x27;s approval.
        • United8573 minutes ago
          About 10% of Meta&#x27;s ad revenue comes from Chinese companies reaching a international audience. They also manufacture most of their wearable devices in China.
      • fmajid4 hours ago
        The Chinese government may not be a bastion of the rule of law, but they at least seem to still have a functioning antitrust enforcement.
        • loeg4 hours ago
          This had nothing to do with antitrust.
          • AndrewKemendo2 hours ago
            What does it have to do with?
            • MaxPock1 hour ago
              It stops Singapore washing.
            • nutjob22 hours ago
              Stopping Chinese nationals from freeing assets and funds from the grip of the Chinese government.
    • kristianc5 hours ago
      Almost certainly Chinese national-security and technology-transfer restrictions around strategic AI tech. China’s NDRC formally prohibited the acquisition and ordered the transaction unwound.
    • rangestransform5 hours ago
      China prevented the founders from leaving the country
      • minraws5 hours ago
        I think they were talking about the part,<p>&gt; As part of our transition back to independent operations and to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, data generated by certain users on&#x2F;after December 29, 2025, will be deleted from 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, 2026 (SGT). Affected users will be able to back up their data from now until 7:59 a.m. on August 23, 2026 (SGT) and restore it starting from 8:00 a.m. on August 25, 2026 (SGT).
      • moralestapia5 hours ago
        [flagged]
    • minraws5 hours ago
      I would guess EU? Technically a bunch of countries don&#x27;t allow data to be with Manus aka Chinese cloud services.<p>For instance, India has quite literally banned Alibaba Cloud and related.
      • makeavish5 hours ago
        No it’s Chinese state who is preventing founders from leaving China <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;2026&#x2F;06&#x2F;12&#x2F;meta-reportedly-begins-dismantling-2-billion-manus-deal-on-beijings-orders.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;2026&#x2F;06&#x2F;12&#x2F;meta-reportedly-begins-d...</a>
        • tancop5 hours ago
          just to be clear, they did this to make sure they follow the governments order instead of running away to Singapore and going on with the acquisition. they will most likely get released when the unwinding process is complete. its not a general national security thing where AI founders cant leave the country.
          • TheGamerUncle3 hours ago
            This is an awfully naive view of the Chinese government, they are clearly not stupid and after seeing what Meta did with thing with Outlier it is clear they will not let the founders out of their grip for quite a while
      • loeg4 hours ago
        Why guess? This is trivially Googleable information.
        • hluska57 minutes ago
          Then google it and post it. This is useless.
  • fitzgera1d1 hour ago
    Switched to avi.run already. But loved Manus initially.
  • capten4 hours ago
    I expect this decupling will affect certain users. Can certain users speak up about this? I&#x27;m certain that certain users use Manus and are users on this certain site.
    • dgellow4 hours ago
      Likely a bad translation from the original Chinese version?<p>That being said it’s the first time I see Manus, they seem to have the perfect AI startup tagline for a new season of HBO’s Silicon Valley:<p>“Our Mission - To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life. Our Product - We build general AI agents as the Action Engine for life.”
  • aslfan3 hours ago
    Bro I remeber manus private beta miss it
  • hnwkbmrkv25 hours ago
    [dead]