7 ms·
Munder Difflin – Agent harness to run an office of your clones
- jodacola 26d ago[dead]
- CodedRichy 14d agofor a beginner its pretty difficult to get around with but the concept is really good in my opinion
- nylonstrung 26d agoThis project is cringe and I really hope we see less stuff like this
- souvlakee 26d agoWhy?
- nusl 26d agoI hope we see fewer comments like this that aren't shitting on projects that you have no stake in anyway
- StilesCrisis 26d agoThis is a business--they have cloud and a sales team.
- nusl 26d agoFair. I'll rm the personal project bit
- stavros 26d agoEh, so what? It's whimsical and fun, and it's better if more things like this exist in the world than not.
- mcmcmc 26d agoThey’re literally reusing IP from The Office. It’s clearly not parody, and they directly reference the show. It’s one thing for a joke project to do that. They are attempting to profit off someone else’s creative work. And not even in the roundabout way AI does.
- StilesCrisis 26d agoNot even in a clever way. The bots don't actually seem to carry any personality traits; they're just ways to label <session_0001> and <session_0002>. I won't accept it as an Office parody if Dwight can work well with others.
- qup 26d agoLegally, I agree. Morally, I think it's totally wild to care if some totally unrelated real world thing gets named after a twenty+ year old cultural icon of a TV show as an homage. They're attempting to profit off their business. The office thing is a theme.
- mcmcmc 26d agoI can’t imagine having so little empathy that you can’t put yourself in the shoes of the creator of the IP. They didn’t even bother to tweak the characters. It’s not “inspired by” or riffing on a theme, it’s a straight ripoff being used to market some AI product. Do you think anyone who created The Office would want to be associated with AI, something that’s threatening to drive them out of a job? What pisses me off the most is it’s just so damn lazy.
- StilesCrisis 26d agoHonestly, making Ricky Gervais upset might be the most redeeming thing in this product.
- qup 25d agoNo man, if it's a "straight ripoff", it would be a TV show. Not an programming application.
- corvettez0606 26d agoThe next steps in innovation will occur at the harness level. Why not have some fun while we’re at it?
- yeodev 26d agoI wouldn't call it cringe but I don't think it adds a lot of value, distracts me even more & even pulls unnecessary resources I'd guess? but if people need some tamagochis to look at while their AI is working, maybe it makes sense
- dcc635 26d agoThat you, Stanley?
- ghusto 26d agoPeople who who "cringe" as an adjective are cringeworthy, and I hope we hear less from them.
- lbreakjai 26d agoCalm down Angela.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- luciana1u 26d ago[flagged]
- nusl 26d agoThis is super cute. I haven't tried it or anything but it's really fun, seems genuinely useful too. I don't really get people calling it cringe.
- inigyou 26d agoThey're thinking it's serious like Gas Town, that's why
- gruez 26d ago>They're thinking it's serious like Gas Town, that's why It's not? https://munderdiffl.in/#pricing https://munderdiffl.in/#pricing
- ethbr1 26d agoSomething can be ridiculous and also conceptually interesting / intelligent. Gas Town was (transparently, directly from the author's writing) a veneer of visual/linguistic flair applied over a conceptually fascinating and well-thought-out attempt to prod gen 1 LLMs (with all their flaws) into infinite, zero-touch agentic loops. That the author chose to do so with Mad Max-themed animals doesn't validate or invalidate the underlying concepts. Personally, I'd rather that than some soulless OpenAI / Anthropic / Microsoft / Google / Meta corporate-scrubbed blob of beige, riskless design. Especially when it was abundantly clear they realized the presentation choice was ridiculous, but the guts were the more important part. And not for nothing, there's the 'We're not Kansas anymore' utility of the sufficiently bizarre, to cue people to avoid reusing the wrong prior expectations. E.g. in Munder Difflin: 'Your LLMs are occasionally brilliant but generally stupid characters, not brilliant human analogs'
- zuInnp 26d agoI guess I wouldn't use it, but I just bought two of the asset packs of the pixel artist instead.
- ImageXav 26d agoThis is fantastic. As the little joke I hope it is. Everyone gets their own small disfunctional group, and gets to figure out the challenges of management. You, the manager, are Michael. You know you have to produce something, and you do, but you have no real idea of how. Your diligent agents are Dwight. Overly literal sycophants that are ready to leap to action at your slightest command without any question. I do think a lot of folk would benefit from the introspection this offers. We've all been given the opportunity to become middle (and middling) managers, and a lot of the challenges we face are those of people who direct. Setting direction is tough. But LLMs are awesome tools.
- jambalaya8 26d agoNot feeling this. Is it necessary to call "agents" by human names? Wouldn't objectives be a safer easier to remember approach to naming? Like, say 'Clips' and 'Seeks'.
- bbkane 26d agoSafer? From a mental health perspective? Tbh I like human names
- jambalaya8 26d agoum no. from a technical design perspective, obviously.
- xp84 26d agoInsightful. I think I’d do better at this orchestration at this particular stage of technology development if I named all my agents Dwight, maybe with an occasional Creed.
- greenspam 23d ago"opportunity to become middle (and middling) managers" or assistant middle managers or assistant to the middle managers
- chanux 26d agoIs it just me or do AI made websites tend to be too verbose?
- Hugsbox 26d agoLLMs in general have a tendency to be overly verbose, in my experience.
- flufluflufluffy 26d agoNot quite verbose but they tend to repeat the same few ideas multiple times with varied wording/imagery. You keep scrolling because you think you’re gonna see something new and by the end you’ve realized you just read the same thing 4 times over.
- pkaeding 25d agoHasn't that been true of marketing websites for a long time?
- trentor 26d agoAnd yet seeing the exact same comment repeated over and over in every thread with an ai generated website is even more verbose. I find it even worse at least the website can contain new information.
- chanux 26d agoPlease pardon. I have seen people complaining that copy being written with an LLM but did not see any mention of verbosity.
- chaicodes 26d agoHey guys, thanks for putting it here, I am Chaitanya I built Munder Difflin, I am here to answer all your questions(except nylonstrung). For people who haven't tried it: Munder Difflin is a local multi-agent harness that wraps around your existing claude code and codex subscriptions(we literally support almost all harnesses/coding agents). Simulations are deterministic, they do not consume tokens, infact most of the users(20K+ in a week) say that it has reduced their token consumption due to a benchmarked memory layer acting as a hive mind called mempalace. Common use cases apart from coding: 1. Create triggers that runs an live agent with your context(Webhooks, slack, scheduled) 2. Almost any kind of automation for yourself(I make it review PRs, send cold emails with enriched context, manage discord, Send myself analytics about how app is doing on email an end to end AI video production and posting workflow in 1 prompt and then some) I'd love to hear your feedbacks on it.
- bot403 26d agoIt's interesting but It was hard to tell from a quick read if this was a fun game with LLMs or a productivity tool. You could stand to make that more clear.
- qarl2 26d agoporque no los dos?
- qarl2 26d agomy last comment was flagged - presumably i didn't make it pedantic enough for someone, so let me try again: why do you feel the need to pigeon-hole this work? the greatest things in life are more than one thing at once. EDIT: stealth edits of your comments is naughty-naughty.
- xp84 26d agoI don’t think GP is being unreasonable. Half of this webpage kinda sounds like parody and the other half serious. It’s valid feedback.
- hnnbxu2nwi 26d ago[dead]
- bedstefar 26d agoIf this dropped just five years ago no one would understand what on earth this software does . In many ways I still don't. Incredible the development we've seen lately, wonder what will stick and what won't?
- deadbabe 26d agoWhy does everyone assume people in the past were idiots? They probably would have figured out what this was for after some critical thinking. Remember those people wrote massive complicated software by hand.
- bedstefar 26d agoI didn't imply people in the past were idiots, but how on earth would anyone know what an _agent harness_ is, say?
- deadbabe 26d agoBecause the term or concept of “AI Agent” existed long before LLMs??? Jesus…
- techpression 26d agoThe concept of agents is from the 1970’s, I love how some people think the idea is new. Sure, they didn’t have the LLM component, but the rest is the same.
- dist-epoch 26d agoAlphaGo already had a harness. An AI in a loop with tools is not exactly a Black Swan.
- grey-area 26d agoIt’s actually a funny oxymoron if you unpack it - agent implies autonomy and intelligence, harnesses are for unintelligent beasts of burden to control them. So you’re right, it makes absolutely no sense and would be hard to decipher, but does perfectly capture the contradictions inherent in attempts to treat dumb LLM word generators as intelligent independent agents.
- doginasuit 26d agoI've thought about something like this. When there is a lot of stuff happening at once, it's a mistake to try and communicate it all with text. Agents use tools, reference databases, reference the web, interact with other agents, and spend time processing the information. When you have several agents operating at the same time, communicating what they are doing using some kind of spatial map is a really smart idea. The office is a decent analog for such a map. Referencing a database? That operation along with processing the information takes a little bit of time. During the interval, have the avatar move to a file cabinet and back to their desk. Have their computer screen change when they access web resources. If they use a particular tool, it can be represented somewhere in the room and used the same way. Interacting with another agent can be similarly represented. Symbolizing the operation of the agent with movement and behavior is a great way to give an overview. It would support a much richer intuition for how they are accomplishing a task. It wouldn't even need to be a game UI for people who will have a hard time feeling like they are doing serious work while watching what appears to be a game, but that wouldn't bother me.
- ethbr1 26d agoIt is nice to see folks experimenting widely with unique visual representations of agent orchestration, as a consequence of the bottom-up / individual-led development that's driving the industry (inasmuch as it exists yet). There are folks young enough now that they've never known anything other than "the desktop" (or CLI) as a computing metaphor. But there's no fundamental reason a metaphor has to be anything specific... it should be whatever is most widely comprehensible and efficient for the problem space.
- Espressosaurus 25d agoLLMs remade Clippy. This sounds like using Microsoft Bob to manage them.
- ethbr1 25d agoImagine how much more infuriated people would have been if Clippy wasn't a cartoonish-looking paperclip, but a human facsimile. Sometimes absurdity or comedy is the point when you're developing a known-partial solution.
- gizmo_clawd 26d ago[flagged]
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- myaccountonhn 26d agoThis is cute and fucked up at the same time.
- junon 26d agoThis looks like a tool from Cowboy Bebop.
- joshstrange 26d agoOk, I've been running it for a couple hours and below are my thoughts. Please note that I do find it fascinating even if most of what I'm about to say is complaining about the parts I like less. - Pipelines, not agents. Roles, not agents. I really don't like the idea of defined agents with their own prompt. I want to define roles and spin up N agents with that role. Furthermore I want pipelines "Plan -> Review Plan -> Approval Gate -> Develop -> Code Review + Fix loop -> QA -> Approval Gate -> Merge -> [Ship]". I don't like the work just bouncing around seemingly randomly - Settings don't seem to save/persist? Or some of them don't. I couldn't let "Michael" spin up agents on "his" own and then randomly he did it even though the setting was still off. Settings has the normal LLM jank I've seen. - macOS Notifications are broken, they send for any little reason, and then they don't send when you're actually needed. It's like each agent finishing a round causes a notification. - Speaking of missing notifications, the _most important_ screen to me is the "Ask Me" tab under "Michael", where they ask questions (more on that later) but there is zero indication that anything is waiting for you. You have to dig into it yourself. - The "Ask Me" tab is great.... when it works. I've had to unstick agents or answer questions they were waiting on answers for - Trying to be too cute, it was cute for a minute, now I don't care (and I _love_ The Office). I want a more utilitarian view. I want to see questions, plans, be able to inject new ideas, and a small overview of what each agent is doing. I don't need half the screen taken up with a "game ui". - Why no clear? I don't understand at all the idea of them keeping context. Maybe I'm missing something and I shouldn't be using persistent agents except for more persistent jobs (like Michael's?). It's an interesting concept, very "Gas Town", and it make me want to write my own that does more of what I'm looking for but I don't have the time (or tokens) currently to take on another project. My current best approach of herdr+6-10 Claude Code sessions feels like it works better than this and keeps me close enough to the decisions I want to make.
- joshstrange 26d agoSome more observations - It seems like letting Michael spin up things is the prefered pathway instead of defining a bunch of agents. - The Ask Me really needs some love. The "X/N" display doesn't make sense to me, I started on "5/5" and as I answered the questions it went to "4/5" -> .... "1/5", I'm not sure if the questions were asked in the wrong order or what. Additionally, it really needs some UI improvement for things like when there are options (and recommendations) it should show as multiple-choice (ALWAYS with a way to add an additional note, this annoys me about Claude Code today). - Why tell the agent you spin up it's not interactive? I really think instead you should hook the AskUserQuestion and proxy that up to Michael and/or the Human directly. I _want_ to see and answer all the questions. Maybe a first pass with an LLM to see if we already have the answer? - I still feel lost in what's happening and have to dig into agents too often to understand what has been farmed out to them. A LLM-generated summary of their task showing under their name would be nice. The Tasks board is nice but I think it and the "Ask Me" should be global tabs instead of nested under "Michael" - Triggers seem cool, I don't have a use for them yet but I think this Claw + Agent Harness path is the correct one. - I keep needing to unstick agents, like Michael, for things asked in the terminal that didn't get put into "Ask Me" or alert me in any way Semi-related, I'd love some kind of SDK/library to abstract the "control XZY Agent" while being able to expose the raw agent to make writing agent harnesses like this easier. I've been playing with a little agent loop but I often wish I could have it spin up/manage a Claude Code instance and control it (I know it's possible but it's finicky).
- x3haloed 26d agoThis is funny and shamelessly bad at the same time. I have no idea how it's getting so much attention.
- atique29 26d agoReference to the office is hilarious, this might actually get as much work done as Michael did in the show
- jstummbillig 26d agoIt's interesting how many of these projects are trying to model the worst parts of work (the office, the interaction and information messiness) and then automate that with agents.
- runtimecraft 25d ago[flagged]
- gverrilla 25d agoI don't understand what is this used for. Is my kitty terminal not enough of a multi-agent orchestrator? Genuinely lost.
- SquireBuilds 25d agoI'm still struggling with setting up long running agents. So far, it's just summoning an agent with a skillset for something specific and then it leaves again. Any tips?
- zuuna 25d ago[flagged]
- Aurornis 25d agoI do like the embrace of The Office as a theme because it so accurately represents the dysfunction of all of the agent swarms I’ve seen: Different personalities pursuing their own little goals that are all competing with each other in subtle ways that eventually leads a funny collapse of the outcome you wanted. There’s no denying that LLMs are getting better by the month, but the current wave of LLM office and personal assistants reminds me of the old trend where people were hiring personal virtual assistants from foreign countries to manage their work and interface with people. It seemed like an obvious time saver but every time I interacted with someone’s virtual assistant it felt like I was playing a little game of navigating hidden structures and communication barriers to get the message I needed to the person hiding behind it all. Then there were the inevitable scheduling failings, missed meetings, dropped emails, and other things that get blamed on the assistant. I’m getting deja vu watching it all happen again with LLMs replacing virtual assistants and outsourced teams. Maybe these concepts work for people who are trying to solo dev and who find it interesting to set up and debug little systems for everything they do, but I really don’t like working with anyone who surrounds themselves with one of these multi-agent coordination systems as an external shell. Keep it to the internal work and maybe it’s fun for some people.
- mrshadowgoose 25d agoIn areas of applicability where GenAI to now considered to be good/great, the pattern I've observed is a frighteningly rapid progression from "abjectly terrible", to "middling and mostly more trouble than it's worth" and then "good/great". Agentic coding and image generation are probably the best examples of this. There's no guarantee that this trend will be seen with virtual assistants, but if it does, we're on the brink of incredible. Dedicated personal assistants, that actually know and understand one's context and work well together, are unarguably hugely appreciated by those who can afford them.
- ShinyLeftPad 25d agoNothing can go wrong if we reduce direct human interaction even further and pay some megacorporations to MITM all of it.
- laptoprabbit 25d agohey neat stuff. I'd actually like the option for the simulation NOT to be deterministic. I don't mind sacrificing 100% of any productivity for this. 1. Pranking: Rejected my PR? I'll put your keyboard in jello. Then the jello'd agent's prompts all get your keyboard is currently in jello attached. 2. Office Romance: Certain agents prefer to work with each other, but can randomly experience entertaining breakups. 3. Dundies style award ceremonies. The titles can show up under their names until the next ceremony i.e. "Hottest Agent in Office"
- madmecodes 25d ago[dead]
- rsoto2 25d agoGOD Orchestrator lmao
- indigodaddy 25d agoWould running this in say a KASM workspace fall within the open source license?
- alentred 25d agoWith so many AI product launches, I don't even understand anymore what's serious and what's a joke. Collectively many recent product launches look like we are building a big lab to study sociology using British humour, uttering absurdities with a serious look and then evaluating what sticks.
- smrtinsert 25d agoIs there something like that but simply a GUI web wrapper around subscriptions and memory layer? I want a web ui. I don't think in terms of these personality types though, my tasks are dynamic. For example, claude can run N agents in one window right now and be accurate about it, so I scope agent by project level.
- kzahel 25d agoThis may be what you're looking for https://yepanywhere.com/ https://yepanywhere.com/
- goglidesdev 25d ago[dead]
- zhixingheyi2023 25d ago[dead]
- CodeWithLeo 25d ago[flagged]
- flasque-sheaf 24d agoThe line in updater.ts that has const REPO = 'chaitanyagiri/munder-difflin' polls the original creator's repo every 6h with autoUpdate default ON, and can download and install their code -- that's straight up remote-code path by default.