I have to agree. I've been using it for a few days now after coming from GrokBot, then Muse, then Dots. None really clicked for me within the first day. Duet seems different. I haven't quite pegged it, but off the top of my hand:

1. Yes, channels really are useful

2. It does seem to be using Opus 5.5 behind the scenes because, shockingly, it's not screwing everything up like the others usually did

3. Agree that the answers are short and to the point. If you want more info, you just pop open whatever task (separate from channels) it started and you can see what it's doing.

Seems like more time in the oven might have paid off here.

Also, to be clear, this is purely used as a personal assistant by me. I still use omp+Paseo for all of my day to day work. I find the separation of concerns kind of nice.

▲ user43928 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I started using Grok Bot a few days ago and I have seen zero screwups.

I don't know what I'd need a channel for, creating bots/personas seems more natural.

Adding credentials is essential, contrary to what the author of the article said. I gave it my library login and it can fetch newspapers for me instead of me clicking through the app every day.

When I had to provide a GitLab token, it nicely spawned a box for me to save the credential.

  - What did not work well -

Voice calls. The quick responses are often dumb while the proper model does the thinking, and in the middle of talking to me it would stop to do work or searches. It did not feel realtime.

Permission settings. There is a form where you can automatically allow actions you describe in natural language. I tried to allow it to run Claude on my computer or Send certain emails automatically, but the settings achieved nothing.

Coding. I wasn't able to make it use Claude, and its own work is worse than me using Opus 5.5 in Claude Code.

  - What worked well -

Planning flights, accessing newspapers from my online library, checking stock in online stores, sending regular summaries of events and weather to plan activities.

	▲	brightball 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I gave it access to a box on my network and it spins up agents in herdr with whatever prompts I give it. Works really well with any agent you tell it to use. Over the weekend I decided to try Lauren Tan’s pstack via her Dr Eggbot and had it built a bot that would run a build for me for a few days. It was a complex enough prompt that it triggered something to let me tell it which models to use and ended up settling on Opus 5.5 for planning and review with Grok 4.7 for the actual coding. Ran for the weekend and completed 5 phases of a project with about 15 PRs. Reviews caught several things and sent them back premerge. I enjoyed a fun weekend with my daughter clearing Escape Rooms in Colorado. Came back to a completed project. It was great.

▲ james_marks 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ve hacked together my own version of this, basically a Swift app to manage secure access so I control the thing that has full disk access.

And then run a coding agent to manage calendar, emails, research projects against my work history, etc, with TouchID for the sensitive pieces.

It’s incredible, I hope to never put a flight on my calendar by hand again, and soon I won’t be buying them, either.

	▲	dmoose an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Would you mind fleshing this out a bit? I'm not following how it identifies the sensitive pieces without sending to a model, or do you mean letting the model see messages, calendar, email, etc. but not able to go beyond those?