We're trying to be a bit more opinionated one layer up: deployable agent runtimes with first-class tasks, persistent /workspace, and rollout/ops primitives like versions, rollback, logs, and secrets.
For example we make it easy to have automatic deployments from your github ci (using our cli), and you can monitor and manage all your deployments in our platform, along with logs, conversation transcripts etc.
I'd think of us more of the deployment, monitoring and storage layer rather than just the compute runtime.
I don't like the positional keybindings. There is no real difference from regular keybindings configured with profiles for Qwerty, Dvorak, etc. In practice, it just means presenting them drawn into keyboards in a way that is hard to quickly search or use in the terminal and anywhere really. Where's the "line" key? Search the drawing! (Oh... it is there in th top left corner, but which exact key?) I prefer a list. So, really, it is not even that big of a "special thing" except the presentation.
Yes! Whether VPS or local VM, this is a thing for good reasons.
Some reasons aren't even optional. Small but regulated entities exist, and most "Team" sized businesses aren't in Google apps or "the cloud" as they think about it, but are in M365, and do pay for cyber insurance.
Cowork with skills plugins that leverage Python or bash is a remarkably enabling framework given how straightforward it is. A skill engineer can sit with an individual contributor domain expert, conversationally decompose the expert's toil into skills and subcommands, iterate a few times, and like magic the IC gets hours back a day.
Cowork is Agents-On-Rails™ for LLM apps, like Rails was to PHP for web apps.
The VM makes that anti-fragile.
For any SaaS builders reading this: by far most white collar small business work is in Microsoft Office. The scarce "Continue with Microsoft" OIDC reaches more potential SMB desks than the ubiquitous "Continue with Google" and you don't have to learn the legacy SAML dance.
Anthropic seems to understand this. It's refreshing when a firm discovers how to cater to the 25–150 seat market. There's an uncanny valley between early adopters and enterprise contracts, but the world runs on SMBs.
Is this profitable? Can imagine it competing with programming tools like Replit, Val town, Openclaw; acting as server for occasionally syncing tools like Bitwarden, Obsidian; webhook receiving tools; VPSes etc.
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