I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.”

I’ve become so cynical this year.

I loved Monica for a while. Paid for subscription/hosting and all that, largely to support development.

For me the problem was the interface. Logging in to keep notes was a pain, I'm not that diligent. Instead I now can keep a local db with claude. It's sad, but this is precisely one example of software I can now do without due to LLMs.

If this matters to the devs, then MCP is a good feature to add, encpasulating all the strangeness of CRM w/ battle tested backend or something...

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about."

That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together.

I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE".

And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to.

/rant

It's always interesting to me when I see someone build a complete personal system around functionality that to me would just be a text file, or maybe an org-mode file.

why aren't mentioning their failed rewrite from 3 years ago? https://www.monicahq.com/en/blog/chandler-is-in-beta/

I'm a happy self-hosted Monica user, I like that I have alerts set to remind me of birthdays and other events, and that there's a place to list, e.g. everyone who got a Christmas card from me last year. I recommend it to people.

I'm agnostic about a rewrite, I never used Chandler and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly serviceable for me the end user as it is. I rarely use the UI. I have been contemplating interacting with it more agentically, maybe having a bot update the record that I had a beer with someone instead of doing it by hand, but I like that it's focused.

I have started musing about how I might bridge it to other systems, like the people I have resolved from faces in my Immich photos, but I neither want or expect Monica to do this for me.

What I'm confused about with Monica is this being v3. Didn't Monica already get rebuilt from the original version in 2017, since there's a beta software called Chandler?

I know very little about the Monica ecosystem but how come you're throwing away a second version as well? What were the flaws in that iteration?

Am I crazy or did they do this before?

Will they finally integrate automated recording of interactions? It’s such a pain to record everything which is why I never used it

The original ShowHN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295

I'd love to hear experiences of using Monica. I've been hesitant to try it out mostly due to my own ignorance of how to get existing data in there and get it into a usable state. But I love the concept.

They lost me when they threw everything out and moved to Chandler. Now they're throwing everything out again. I love the idea, maybe it's time to vibecode an alternative.

I tried out Monica when it was posted to hn ages ago and still get the occasional reminder. But I've mostly switched to using the contacts app on my iphone for everything. It has primitive features that support 95% of what I need.

Weren't they already rebuilding it a couple of years ago?

Great! Maybe this time around I’ll manage to get the email notifications going

what is the benefit of this over a text file / apple notes? And especially now, with LLMs , a form interface (with screens, tabs, submit buttons) is even more clumsy?

Their best bet would be to train a model and provide an enhanced notepad and chat interface that extracts the relationship details directly from conversations.