Anthropic's Duet chatbot wins early praise for channel organization
Developer nathanfig reviews Duet as the first personal assistant interface that prioritizes speed and session management over credential hoarding.
What to know
- Duet's channel system organizes work contexts automatically, solving a pain point across competing LLM assistants—session sprawl and lost threads.
- The core security tension remains: assistants that lack access to user identity and financial data cannot perform lifestyle tasks (bookings, transactions), but granting such access creates exfiltration risk via prompt injection.
- Early reception splits between genuine enthusiasm (speed, interface design) and skepticism about whether restricted agents deliver real utility, with some users defending isolated-agent models (separate email/phone) as compromise.
The dispute Whether Duet's security-first credential refusal is a strength (protecting user data, a genuine UX advance) or a fundamental limitation that prevents real personal-assistant functionality. · positions read across 17 posts and comments
Duet is a meaningful step forward in assistant UX, especially for development workflows.
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“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”
aliasxneo · Hacker News ↗
Agents without personal credentials are fundamentally limited and cannot deliver the full-service assistant functionality they promise.
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“Like if it can't use my drivers license or my phone number or my credit card, it can't do 75% of things people claim it can do without being massive security issues. What am I missing?”
mbesto · Hacker News ↗
Isolated-agent models (separate email/account, accessed via proxy like Slack) offer a practical compromise between utility and security.
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“I get a lot of value out of my Hermes setup, but it does not have my banking, or private data beyond GitHub projects that are shared with it. It has its own email and GitHub account”
largbae · Hacker News ↗
Duet still lags competitors like Dot in features (voice, desktop integration, shell access).
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“Just got access today. I like the channels, but I'm actually finding a few things frustrating compared to Dots: no phone calls (convenient to braindump and have it clean up later) and I don't have shell access”
dovin · Hacker News ↗
The record 1 articles and posts · last 14 days
What people are saying 16 voices from 1 site · best of 17 · verbatim
- Can agents deliver meaningful lifestyle assistance (booking travel, managing finances, scheduling) without access to user identity and payment methods?
- Is the isolated-agent model (separate email/phone/account) a sustainable workaround, or does it too severely cripple functionality?
- Oct 30
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I'm on your side wrt sensitive data, but there are other use cases. I use the OpenAI one: Dot, and this is why I've found it valuable:- it uses a very fast model for normal responses, but also does reasoning and all the agent things. It responds within a second or two. - it feels like it has multiple threads internally- it can respond to your…
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It's a shame that it's not yet available outside the U.S. I'm using Dots; it's great that they keep me developing, but it still doesn't seem to be progressing well because it hasn't fully matched the quality I want or my context. (I may need to redesign the workflow with Dots) I want to try a Duet soon, too.
- Oct 29
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Perhaps services could permit buying things with special AI credit card numbers that link to a special account that the user needs to manually approve by some period of time or else the order is canceled? Works differently though than normal payments where they can just ship the product or deliver the service based on receiving the credit card…
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I will be shocked if anything can beat Grok Bot for usefulness at this point.It took me 2 days to hit “how did I ever survive without this” and it’s only gotten better.
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I would be much more tempted to switch over to this from Hermes if I didn't have to deal with claudese.
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Current flavor of the week variant of OpenClaw "feels useful". Now that's an endorsement.
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Just got access today. I like the channels, but I'm actually finding a few things frustrating compared to Dots: no phone calls (convenient to braindump and have it clean up later) and I don't have shell access to its underlying VM like with Dots. It's also weirdly hard / impossible to spawn Claude Code for Web workers and I can't connect the agent…
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I get a lot of value out of my Hermes setup, but it does not have my banking, or private data beyond GitHub projects that are shared with it. It has its own email and GitHub account, and access to drive Codex, Claude Code or Cursor. I treat it as an assistant via Slack.It does research on products or real estate that I am interested in, it builds…
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Sounds like Duet is more like Grokbot than Muse? Haven't used it but the author is talking about channels, github policy access for specific channels, etc. That doesn't sound like the Muse use case.I actually use Claude's agents on the Claude platform for all things work related and it works pretty well. It's not cheap though if you use the more…
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FWIW, my biggest use case for agents like this is ongoing research. I.e.: check Humble Bundle weekly and tell me if there’s a book bundle I might be interested in. Has the Music Box announced a film series I might want to visit Chicago for? That sort of thing; I want filters for the firehose.
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Yeah, that's the core of the issue:https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/The "lethal trifecta": To be useful, an agent needs internet access, untrusted inputs, and your private information.So it can get prompt injected and exfiltrate your data. (Indeed I read that Claude Code puts your email address into HTTP requests it makes…
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In the article the author mentions that Duet doesn't seek any sort of credentials and mentions connecting repos, so I think that this assistant is being used more for managing coding work in a different way than managing life work. I do agree that to get to true "personal assistant" levels, like planning a whole trip for you, booking tickets, etc…
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Am I missing something, how is there any sort value in these assistants acting as agents on your behalf when they are basically a black box? Like if it can't use my drivers license or my phone number or my credit card, it can't do 75% of things people claim it can do without being massive security issues. What am I missing?For the record I use…
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I disagree on the voice interaction point. I DO want voice modes to be glorified STT-TTS.The OpenAI AVM is uncanny and over-eager to me. You can run Anthropic voice on Opus since a handful days and it's incredibly snappy without feeling weird.
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I’m excited to try this. I got Instinct after hearing all the hype and it is basically completely useless. Fails at the most basic browser navigation type tasks.Right now the consumer agent players are trying to pretend they have decent functionality that will exist 3-6 months so they can get marketshare. So hopefully Anthropic is sticking to…
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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 useful2. It does seem to be using Opus 5.5 behind the scenes because, shockingly, it's not…