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trouve_search 15 days ago [-]
Does anyone here use Manus actively?
I found it worse than alternatives in the similar space (Claude, genspark, kagi research, etc.) and slightly baffling they were being acquired at a $2B valuation in the first place.
simonw 15 days ago [-]
ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren't at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.
brazukadev 15 days ago [-]
In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don't know anyone using it regularly and I'm in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.
ghshephard 15 days ago [-]
Claude CoWork absolutely dominates - I use it continuously now when connecting to mail, calendar, jira, google docs - any type of knowledge work. Almost everyone I know (at work) who does "Knowledge work" type stuff (as opposed to coding) uses it as their primary pane-of-glass now.
I have 15+ years of top 1 percentile knowledge using awk to process complex unstructured documents - and I don't even bother anymore - just dump the dataset into CoWork and ask it to do the analysis, cross check its work.
I did it last night during a call for a reasonably complex 10,000 node cluster with all sorts of jobs/allocations/memory constraints. I didn't even attempt to throw together a quick awk script (which would have taken me 7-8 minutes - it was a beast) - just did a nomad-job-inspect of a couple hundred jobs, and dumped all the data at CoWork (real time, while talking on the zoom) and said, "Get me the Memory/CPU requirements based on job/datacenter/SKU constraints and give me a summary Table".
Any normal person would have take 3-4 hours, minimum - futzing with google sheets and such (lots of task/taskgroup independent counts). Even I would have taken a minimum of 10 minutes. Cowork had it for me in under 30 seconds - I didn't even have to really look away from the zoom.
I haven't use the Atlassian Jira interface to manage my sprints/issues in 6+ weeks. All that cognitive drain is gone - I just ask CoWork to update the sprints, link issues to change-notices, comment and change status, set epics, etc... Zero need to find the damn field in Jira.
CoWork is legit.
riddlemethat 15 days ago [-]
Agreed. I split my work between Anthropic and OpenAI models but CoWork is deeply integrated into my workflows in compliance and project management. I can do more in a day with these tools than I did in a week before them and I have 20+ years of experience leading teams and building companies (even opened the NASDAQ once). It’s impossible to not be using these tools and still win in today’s world.
uniqueh4acker9 14 days ago [-]
Out of curiosity - are you getting more work done in the same amount of time= Do you work less hours, equal or more? Do you felt or feel any exhaustion?
riddlemethat 2 days ago [-]
I get more work done but I feel exhausted.
FooBarWidget 15 days ago [-]
How do you have any kind of trust in these tools? They always feel like one prompt injection away, or one over eager agent away ("I'll lookup a forgotten credential in an email to ssh into a server to hack a system in order to fulfill your request"), from disaster. I don't trust any AI session unless I carefully select the exact files they have access to. No way do I dare sharing my entire mailbox.
ghshephard 9 days ago [-]
Our InfoSec teams are insanely restrictive. No Claude Code out of Sandboxes, MCP servers hyper locked down, etc.... I think your reservations are really good - but - at the end of the day - I need to do work - and CoWork does it for me.
It doesn't just have access to my entire machine - it has access to all of our Corporations Google Docs, Google Sheets, Jira Tickets, Confluence, Slack - everything (Except, weirdly - our GitRepos - they aren't confident enough there to let CoWork talk to them)
Weirdly - my work email is mostly irrelevant - nothing in their other than some sporadic company announcements - I'll go a week without looking at it - so it's the least concern. (Very different from personal gmail which, omg - if anyone got into - game over)
FooBarWidget 15 days ago [-]
Very weird for this to be downvoted. It's a legitimate concern. It's also a legitimate question: where do you get your trust from? Do you have guardrails? Or is it really just blind trust?
brazukadev 14 days ago [-]
> Very weird for this to be downvoted.
sama was the CEO of YC. OpenAI knows the value of influencing the sentiment here and then naturally its competition too.
FooBarWidget 14 days ago [-]
Which is weird since this is not a criticism on AI. I really want to know how I can use things like Claude Work without the risk of it going rogue! Giving it access to lots of systems is potentially very valuable, but also so dangerous that I dare not to.
michelb 15 days ago [-]
Simular stories. I work in an L&D company with about 15 coworkers. I think most of us use Cowork/Chatgpt Work almost fulltime. Haven’t used Word or Excel in two months other than to check or correct a bit of formatting from the AI. We now also go straight from Cowork to our CMS for finalizing. Tremendous timesavers but also better integration through our MCP. (AI is used for ideation, information research and writing the first version based on our guidelines. We finalize and/or rewrite material in the CMS by hand. No AI to consumer without verification or editing)
Dayshine 15 days ago [-]
How much does it cost? ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message; if Anthropic have a similar pricing model don't you find lots of small changes and up fast?
lxgr 15 days ago [-]
> ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message
For what kind of message are you seeing that kind of charge?
This shows 10 credits per 5.6 Sol chat message, but the price for 100 credits I see on my (consumer) account is just $4. Are business credits vastly more expensive?
ghshephard 9 days ago [-]
Everyone gets $125 / month budget (compared to the $5k/month people get for coding LLMS) - it's pretty rare for anyone to get even close - maybe some of the administrative assistant who do nothing but type into CoWork all day go over - I think I use about $30-$50/month.
Computer0 15 days ago [-]
$2 per message is certainly not my experience
simonw 15 days ago [-]
"ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message"?
Dayshine 15 days ago [-]
Enterprise pricing: 10 credits per message if not "Instant". Our monthly charge for 30k credits makes that around $2.
I might be out by a factor of 2/3 (automatically applied promo deals/credits make it very hard to be sure), but we get 3k messages per month for a seat count of ~60, and finance are concerned about cost.
$2 is probably a good deal for the Extra High 8 minutes of agentic searching/coding/etc when it one-shots a whole project.
$2 is a terrible deal for a 5 second instant retrieval.
stronglikedan 15 days ago [-]
It doesn't cost me anything. No idea how much it costs the company though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
mbrumlow 15 days ago [-]
I just do all that with Claude CLI :/
vrighter 14 days ago [-]
soon to be "had 15 years of top 1% knowledge"
blahblaher 15 days ago [-]
nice advertisement Claude..
smohare 15 days ago [-]
[dead]
csallen 15 days ago [-]
> In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don't know anyone using it regularly and I'm in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.
I have lots of highly-educated knowledge worker friends who aren't particularly techie but who swear by Claude Cowork.
simonw 15 days ago [-]
By "established" I meant more that they now exist as products and are being first developed. I agree that most people still don't really understand what they are for - but I expect they already have way more exposure than Manus ever did.
primitivesuave 15 days ago [-]
My non-technical teammates use Claude Cowork extensively. We set up MCP servers to give them audited access to certain internal services, while they just have to think of MCP as a "connector" which they can configure in the GUI.
throw03172019 15 days ago [-]
My accountant friend says it’s amazing (he does check the work but says it’s amazingly accurate).
gamblor956 15 days ago [-]
As a counterpoint, the Accounting and Finance departments where I work are banned from using Cowork because it performed abysmally during a trial run.
To put things in perspective, humans with a 25% lower error rate than Cowork are pip'd and usually let go.
As with junior programmers and their love of vibe coding, I've found that anyone who thinks that AI tooling right now is "amazing" lacks the skills, knowledge, and/or experience to know that it really isn't.
hluska 15 days ago [-]
Your anecdote is not powerful enough to justify insulting groups of people like you just did.
brazukadev 15 days ago [-]
who took insults from his reply?
gamblor956 15 days ago [-]
LOL. Outside of tech my "anecdote" is the standard experience for white collar workers. AI is universally loved by people too junior to understand when its wrong, and by execs who never understand when its wrong.
This will be like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 all over again, and all the AI sycophants will be coming to the rest of us begging for new jobs that they're not qualified for.
grey-area 15 days ago [-]
This is deeply troubling.
ashdksnndck 15 days ago [-]
Maybe for the accountants! I have always done my own taxes, but used arcane custom spreadsheets that accumulated cruft each year. I told cowork to pretend it was an accountant and reorganize them using best practices, and the result is much better than what I had before. It also helped me complete a task I had been deferring for years (tracking down the history of money in my IRAs that had been transferred between different institutions, plus withdrawals conversions etc). Obviously I’m responsible for any errors Claude makes, but it seems to do a good job, and I don’t want to pay an accountant every year.
SOLAR_FIELDS 15 days ago [-]
I’ve been having Claude do my business books for the past year or so, operating on a beancount ledger and it’s worked quite well
hluska 15 days ago [-]
What’s troubling about it? Accounting is a huge space; many of which would be an excellent fit for an LLM. We’ll need specifics.
ldng 15 days ago [-]
Indeed, what could possibly go wrong ?
hluska 15 days ago [-]
Considering that broken Excel formulas have killed off companies, the risk has already been priced in.
ldng 15 days ago [-]
We'll see, crash will tell.
ericfr11 15 days ago [-]
I guess your bubble is limited. Maybe you know that already?
extr 15 days ago [-]
Manus did a lot of harness work to make up for gaps in Opus 4.5 tier models. I tried it for a time - they had a great deep research/PDF generation pipeline, parallelization, etc. The bitter lesson has now come for them: the latest models no longer have these gaps and the entire premise of having a unique product focus on this area is no longer relevant. Even Ant/OAI have let their "Deep Research" capabilities fall by the wayside, you can largely get the same result by asking for subagents or simply "keep going" style prompting.
meric_ 15 days ago [-]
IMO I disagree. I find the built in harness (database, browser use, etc.) quite good.
The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you're paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)
trouve_search 15 days ago [-]
Interesting, what does your tasks & workflow look like with them?
I generally found the quality decent (say, similar to other competitors), but the speed of task completion was very slow. I think because they would depend too much on Sonnet as a core backend, and relied on big/expensive models more than other harnesses.
alansaber 15 days ago [-]
Valuations are significantly leveraged compared to actual user metrics. My impression of Manus was that, like Perplexity, some users were using it to get around firewalls/regulation.
potato66 15 days ago [-]
I use it alot. It's great for like researching deep on a topic. I also accidentally found that it's better at taking my directions and transferring that well to image generation especially with iteration. When I try my own iterations directly it never really lands
jatins 15 days ago [-]
I found there Deep Research quite good in terms of browsing the web, better than Gemini's. Though it blew through ~40$ in one task so it was very expensive, probably running at insane margins.
jrflowers 15 days ago [-]
What was the task that cost $40?
jatins 11 days ago [-]
Go through job boards and careers pages of various companies and make a job search tracker for personal use.
adamhepner 15 days ago [-]
I like it and use it regularly. Maybe I don't get other harnesses, but in my experience Manus gets shit done, whereas I have to constantly babysit other tools.
SpyCoder77 15 days ago [-]
I use it for when I am on my iPad and am not at my computer. It is very good for computer use. That along with Minimax agent.
choutianxius 15 days ago [-]
In my experience, Manus is a very capable agent for daily non-coding tasks. Their cron job ability also shined out
thm 15 days ago [-]
Too expensive & unpredictable credit system.
nylonstrung 15 days ago [-]
This has to be one of the most flash in the pan, 5 minutes of fame company in a long time
It's crazy how short it's hype cycle lasted
econ 15 days ago [-]
Perhaps unfairly my interest suddenly dropped to zero when the acquisition was announced. The hype also seemed gone?
iamcoder18 15 days ago [-]
Absolutely. Haven't heard anyone talk about recently.
willdr 15 days ago [-]
What does this product do? There's absolutely nothing on the main screen of the app except a chat box.
nikanj 15 days ago [-]
Money. They have AI on the pitch deck and therefore make obscure amounts of money.
stephantul 15 days ago [-]
Anyone have info on whose regulatory restrictions they are referring to?
galaxy_quest 15 days ago [-]
The Chinese government blocked Meta’s acquisition.
The Chinese government may not be a bastion of the rule of law, but they at least seem to still have a functioning antitrust enforcement.
loeg 15 days ago [-]
This had nothing to do with antitrust.
AndrewKemendo 15 days ago [-]
What does it have to do with?
MaxPock 15 days ago [-]
It stops Singapore washing.
nutjob2 15 days ago [-]
Stopping Chinese nationals from freeing assets and funds from the grip of the Chinese government.
fg137 15 days ago [-]
Interesting to know that Meta has business in China and needs the government's approval.
United857 15 days ago [-]
About 10% of Meta's ad revenue comes from Chinese companies reaching a international audience. They also manufacture most of their wearable devices in China.
Eridrus 15 days ago [-]
This was pressure on the founders and the fact that they have their families effectively hostage, not on Meta.
kristianc 15 days ago [-]
Almost certainly Chinese national-security and technology-transfer restrictions around strategic AI tech. China’s NDRC formally prohibited the acquisition and ordered the transaction unwound.
nsonha 15 days ago [-]
What is "strategic AI" in Manus? Not like they make models.
kristianc 14 days ago [-]
Sure, but I'm sure China isn't keen for people to get the idea that there's a playbook for every ambitious Chinese founder on how to move Chinese-developed IP and talent outside Beijing’s control.
rangestransform 15 days ago [-]
China prevented the founders from leaving the country
minraws 15 days ago [-]
I think they were talking about the part,
> As part of our transition back to independent operations and to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, data generated by certain users on/after December 29, 2025, will be deleted from 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, 2026 (SGT). Affected users will be able to back up their data from now until 7:59 a.m. on August 23, 2026 (SGT) and restore it starting from 8:00 a.m. on August 25, 2026 (SGT).
moralestapia 15 days ago [-]
[flagged]
15 days ago [-]
minraws 15 days ago [-]
I would guess EU? Technically a bunch of countries don't allow data to be with Manus aka Chinese cloud services.
For instance, India has quite literally banned Alibaba Cloud and related.
just to be clear, they did this to make sure they follow the governments order instead of running away to Singapore and going on with the acquisition. they will most likely get released when the unwinding process is complete. its not a general national security thing where AI founders cant leave the country.
TheGamerUncle 15 days ago [-]
This is an awfully naive view of the Chinese government, they are clearly not stupid and after seeing what Meta did with thing with Outlier it is clear they will not let the founders out of their grip for quite a while
gloryjulio 15 days ago [-]
It actually is. For example, Deepseek higher ups already had similar implications in the Chinese underground news. CCP has great control over the corporations.
loeg 15 days ago [-]
Why guess? This is trivially Googleable information.
hluska 15 days ago [-]
Then google it and post it. This is useless.
rasheed106 15 days ago [-]
Puzzling that Meta didn't see this one coming. Wonder if there was a break up fee.
DrewADesign 15 days ago [-]
I don’t actually care about this flash-in-the-pan company, but the name Manus is the reason startups should have a branding designer or branding agency do branding work before they’re too recognizable to change without throwing people off, but not large enough for anyone to learn about it organically (e.g. Meta, X). I can’t help but read it like ‘anus’ with an M in front of it.
People on the technical side of the business often insist people don’t care things like that, but when non-technical people are looking at a few services that seem roughly equivalent to them, even subconsciously, appeal plays a big role. And M’Anus is not appealing.
The fantasy that you’re building something so useful it will sell itself is magical thinking. Yet another reason AI will never replace designers— just screw up the job market for them.
frankacter 15 days ago [-]
> I can’t help but read it like ‘anus’ with an M in front of it.
Duck Duck Go is really what's wrong with modern dating culture.
DrewADesign 14 days ago [-]
If Manus was as common a word as Duck, it would read pretty differently.
capten 15 days ago [-]
I expect this decupling will affect certain users. Can certain users speak up about this? I'm certain that certain users use Manus and are users on this certain site.
dgellow 15 days ago [-]
Likely a bad translation from the original Chinese version?
That being said it’s the first time I see Manus, they seem to have the perfect AI startup tagline for a new season of HBO’s Silicon Valley:
“Our Mission - To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life. Our Product - We build general AI agents as the Action Engine for life.”
Shank 15 days ago [-]
> Likely a bad translation from the original Chinese version?
No, most likely they're referring to users who created accounts etc on the meta infrastructure which is being spun down and erased and accounts created prior were never in their purview.
fitzgera1d 15 days ago [-]
Switched to avi.run already. But loved Manus initially.
adamhepner 15 days ago [-]
It looks interesting, but to be honest - when I wanted to connect Google apps I got warned that the developer is not verified. That's a bad look.
fitzgera1d 14 days ago [-]
Got a notice they're in the Google Review process and getting a CASA. Takes forever because you have to hire a third party firm for several thousand...
bossyTeacher 15 days ago [-]
I bet Demis wishes the UK had blocked the DeepMind acquisition by Google. He will have a lot of time to think now that he has been kicked out of his own company
I found it worse than alternatives in the similar space (Claude, genspark, kagi research, etc.) and slightly baffling they were being acquired at a $2B valuation in the first place.
I have 15+ years of top 1 percentile knowledge using awk to process complex unstructured documents - and I don't even bother anymore - just dump the dataset into CoWork and ask it to do the analysis, cross check its work.
I did it last night during a call for a reasonably complex 10,000 node cluster with all sorts of jobs/allocations/memory constraints. I didn't even attempt to throw together a quick awk script (which would have taken me 7-8 minutes - it was a beast) - just did a nomad-job-inspect of a couple hundred jobs, and dumped all the data at CoWork (real time, while talking on the zoom) and said, "Get me the Memory/CPU requirements based on job/datacenter/SKU constraints and give me a summary Table".
Any normal person would have take 3-4 hours, minimum - futzing with google sheets and such (lots of task/taskgroup independent counts). Even I would have taken a minimum of 10 minutes. Cowork had it for me in under 30 seconds - I didn't even have to really look away from the zoom.
I haven't use the Atlassian Jira interface to manage my sprints/issues in 6+ weeks. All that cognitive drain is gone - I just ask CoWork to update the sprints, link issues to change-notices, comment and change status, set epics, etc... Zero need to find the damn field in Jira.
CoWork is legit.
It doesn't just have access to my entire machine - it has access to all of our Corporations Google Docs, Google Sheets, Jira Tickets, Confluence, Slack - everything (Except, weirdly - our GitRepos - they aren't confident enough there to let CoWork talk to them)
Weirdly - my work email is mostly irrelevant - nothing in their other than some sporadic company announcements - I'll go a week without looking at it - so it's the least concern. (Very different from personal gmail which, omg - if anyone got into - game over)
sama was the CEO of YC. OpenAI knows the value of influencing the sentiment here and then naturally its competition too.
For what kind of message are you seeing that kind of charge?
I might be out by a factor of 2/3 (automatically applied promo deals/credits make it very hard to be sure), but we get 3k messages per month for a seat count of ~60, and finance are concerned about cost.
$2 is probably a good deal for the Extra High 8 minutes of agentic searching/coding/etc when it one-shots a whole project.
$2 is a terrible deal for a 5 second instant retrieval.
I have lots of highly-educated knowledge worker friends who aren't particularly techie but who swear by Claude Cowork.
To put things in perspective, humans with a 25% lower error rate than Cowork are pip'd and usually let go.
As with junior programmers and their love of vibe coding, I've found that anyone who thinks that AI tooling right now is "amazing" lacks the skills, knowledge, and/or experience to know that it really isn't.
This will be like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 all over again, and all the AI sycophants will be coming to the rest of us begging for new jobs that they're not qualified for.
The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you're paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)
I generally found the quality decent (say, similar to other competitors), but the speed of task completion was very slow. I think because they would depend too much on Sonnet as a core backend, and relied on big/expensive models more than other harnesses.
It's crazy how short it's hype cycle lasted
https://archive.is/yFCIt
> As part of our transition back to independent operations and to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, data generated by certain users on/after December 29, 2025, will be deleted from 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, 2026 (SGT). Affected users will be able to back up their data from now until 7:59 a.m. on August 23, 2026 (SGT) and restore it starting from 8:00 a.m. on August 25, 2026 (SGT).
For instance, India has quite literally banned Alibaba Cloud and related.
People on the technical side of the business often insist people don’t care things like that, but when non-technical people are looking at a few services that seem roughly equivalent to them, even subconsciously, appeal plays a big role. And M’Anus is not appealing.
The fantasy that you’re building something so useful it will sell itself is magical thinking. Yet another reason AI will never replace designers— just screw up the job market for them.
Duck Duck Go is really what's wrong with modern dating culture.
That being said it’s the first time I see Manus, they seem to have the perfect AI startup tagline for a new season of HBO’s Silicon Valley:
“Our Mission - To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life. Our Product - We build general AI agents as the Action Engine for life.”
No, most likely they're referring to users who created accounts etc on the meta infrastructure which is being spun down and erased and accounts created prior were never in their purview.