Discussion summary
Rowboat is an open-source, local-first AI tool that aims to be a feature-rich alternative to Claude Desktop. Users are excited about its potential, but some express concerns about the need for more genuine, built-from-scratch solutions.
What the discussion says
- Users appreciate the feature set and potential of Rowboat.
- Some critics call for more original, less wrapper-based AI tools.
- Concerns about the development time and ongoing feature completeness.
- Interest in contributing to the project and improving its capabilities.
“Really cool, how long did something like this take to build?”
“This looks great, but let's see if I have this right ...”
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- Hacker News
- I gave this a real shot, but I found it impossible to use the email client. There are basic things like collapsing replies (in a conversation with multiple lawyers no less, damn do they love their email signatures) are extremely important. Without them, it makes scannning and replying to email, even withe aid of AI, impossible.
Really love the whole idea and I hope it gets more usable.
by superultra - Thanks for trying it out and reporting this.
We looked into the specific issue you mentioned. Collapsing replies does exist in the product, but we found it doesn't work for emails sent from Outlook (our guess on why you might have faced this). We are fixing this in the next release, shipping this week. Hope you give it a try.
by segmenta - This is neat, excited to try it. Over the last months I’ve been exclusively using Codex for non-coding tasks. It’s not bad, but there’s much to improve. This seems like a step in the right direction!by sizero
- Thanks! Would love to hear what you think, after you get a chance to try it.by segmenta
- This looks really great! Quick question, is there any support for using local models?by nshotton
- Yes! You can use local models through Ollama and LM Studio. We do some special handling when you use local models, such as suppressing background agents when you chat, so the model is not overwhelmed.by segmenta
- This looks great, but let's see if I have this right ...
The "Agent Apps" (or whatever we are calling them) from the big vendors are organized around projects/folders, and we attach apps (via plugins) to the projects.
This appears to mae the apps (work surfaces) the primary artifact?
by tomComb - Yes, that's mostly right.
Surfaces are the primary artifact for collaborating with the assistant - each one attaches an app to a workflow and gives both you and the agent a structured place to work, instead of everything flowing through chat.
Chat is still first class, and projects/folders exist separately to organize work around it.
by segmenta - All I want in an AI is this:
1. cd <myVeryImportantProject.repo> 2. start_AI_agent_REPL 3. "hey AI, analyze the code base in this repo, and find any and all bugs related to 'e.g. porting from 32bit -> 64bit architecture', create work branches for the bug fixes, submit a PR at the repo site for each fix" 4. Goto 3.
I want to be able to treat my AI/ML assistant as a daemon I can turn on and off for any repo - I do not want it to be running all the time, I don't want an email interface to it, I don't want it to analyze my system to try to help me, I want it to be treated like any other system service I will enable and disable, per-directory, manually.
Everything else - the desktop app, the in-built browser, the Obsidian note-taking system - is pure noise, and it immediately disqualifies Rowboat from any investment on my part.
Just a simple daemon style approach, with a REPL, an interface to Git, and THAT IS ALL.
There will be a time and place for a whole new radical UI to AI/ML in my personal laboratory - that time is when I get a brand new machine dedicated just to AI/ML and only put things on it that I want to put on it. Not my personal machine, not my development machine - a machine that will only function as a junior AI/ML-based software developer in my team, with an interface to Git that is standard and battle-tested over years and years of actual work - and nothing else.
I know this tool is out there. I continue to swim through the junk to find it, however.
Rowboat is instantly disqualified from my environment by bringing in too many bells and whistles - all of it junk, because I will have to learn to manage it all anew, and that is not what I want in an AI/ML agent.
Anything which detracts from having AI/ML sandboxed as a daemon and its only interface through the current .git/config for the repo I'm applying it to, is noise and nonsense.
by MomsAVoxell - I actually was using this quite a lot earlier this year, thanks for this!
What I actually ended up doing was regularly pointing Claude at the Rowboat directory. Really useful to have all of this context available as markdown files.
I use my own standard format for all context capsules, and had my own branch running with that format hacked in.
Being able to describe the format in a plugin style architecture would be awesome.
Granola notes silently stopped working when they decided to encrypt the DB, interesting to see you've got your own in there now.
Will check it out again.
by _puk - That is great to know!
We heard of others pointing Claude to the knowledge graph. It made us double down on building a Claude desktop alternative, so we could couple them deeply. For instance, there are places you could provide feedback on emails to Rowboat and that goes into the knowledge graph which then improves the email handling. Something like this would be hard, if we did not control the assistant as well.
Would love to see your context capsule format. We could definitely make it possible to describe your own format.
Granola no longer working was what led us to build it natively.
Welcome back. Would love your thoughts on the product.
by segmenta - Really interesting, thanks for creating this. I've been slow to adopt the desktop apps (although use the web interface and VS code plugins for all the main players). This might just be the point at which there's a vendor-agnostic option worth investing my effort into setting up.
My question is, can I interact with it over mobile? If I'm away from the desktop, and I want to check-in with it (query the .knowledge, or trigger some coding task etc), is there that option?
by QuicklyNow - Yes! Under settings you can connect your WhatsApp or Telegram and chat with the assistant. It can query your knowledge and trigger coding tasks.
In addition, we have a caffeinate mode (in new release) that keeps your machine awake so the connection doesn't drop. We are also working on a mobile app.
by segmenta - Look really great! I'm a bit sad that the only way to connect to email is gmail. Is a generic IMAP connector on your roadmap?by dr_hooo
- Thanks!
Fair - it's Gmail-only today. We've thought about generic IMAP, but it seems to have some technical gaps for how our email surface works. For instance, there's no reliable cross-provider way to pre-create drafts on a thread. So we haven't prioritized it just yet. We do plan to add Outlook support soon.
by segmenta - The growing problem with this and many other AI offerings is the asymmetry of effort.
All of them take my notes, meeting transcripts, jira tickets, code, websites, and give me more to read.
Then everyone else in the org is doing the same, to give me more to read. At the end of the day there is too much to read.
AI is supposed to be reducing toil, but it's just making more.
by ActionHank - Have you tried having AI read it for you? /sby booi
- Fair point. But our goal with Rowboat is to do the opposite, to distill down only the parts you care about. For instance, you are not expected to read meeting notes, the important parts from it are added to your knowledge graph. That way next time you want to know something like 'where are we on x', you can find exactly that without having to wade through irrelevant information to get there.by segmenta
- Looks great. Is there an onboarding/xfer workflow from an existing Claude code harness?
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time building my wiki, feature plans, retrospectives, client overviews, meta overview, log, skills, commands and the barrier to trying a new command surface or agent is always “will I maintain my edge”.
Or am I misunderstanding? Is it that I would just spawn windows to that existing harness and get to harvest additive features/data from rowboat on top?
Edit - my typical approach would be to scrape out features from a tool like this to bolt onto my harness, why would I not do that here?
- You should be able to ask the assistant to copy over your data to its 'knowledge' folder. This is in ~/.rowboat/knowledge - you could copy it over manually too. Now Rowboat should be able to access and update it. If it's under knowledge then it auto-updates with new emails, meetings etc.
Alternately you can point Rowboat directly to your folder by setting workspace in the assistant chat and it should be able to read and use it. It can update it as well, but you would need to explicitly ask it to do so.
I'm happy to onboard you over a call if you'd like (you can DM me on Discord).
by segmenta - What I'm looking for right now is a tool like this that lets more than one person participate in the conversation: right now Claude Code and similar tools are great for working alone, but I'd like to effectively pair-prompt with a partner who can see what's happening, and take turns steering the conversation.
Can Rowboat do this? If not, does anybody know a harness that can?
by dannyobrien - Haven't tried them but there are ways to wire a coding agent to slack, that gives you a multi-user session right there doesn't it?
Or you could use tmux and a shared login and any tui agent harness.
Obviously they would be very flawed but a place to start.
by Pxtl - Rather than a single application, is it possible to run a VM and have multiple remote access sharing one login session?
I get that great pains have been made to make sure that doesn't happen by default. But if you really want to co-op on something, why not at the session level on a dedicated VM/login pair?
by _carbyau_ - This isn't exactly what you're looking for but for just the coding part, I am working on https://www.buildautomaton.com to allow multiple people to participate on a shared coding session. It's also bring your own agent subscription, uses ACP to talk to any agent (Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc), and is end-to-end encrypted for most of your IP.by rchodava
- Have you tried using a purpose built pair programming app? Essentially these are tools with low latency screen sharing and remote control. Then you can pair-prompt in a call.by iparaskev
- I built a harness in the cloud with slack like interface for this, allowing multiple people to join. It allows chat members to tag action items, work on files and sync to GitHub. My team uses it to coordinate on our task and teM context together, setup meetings which are auto transcripted and ingested into the attached wiki, and connect to calendar to setup meetings. Built it for our needs.
Didn't really consider putting it out in public. Is there a viable product out of this? How much would you pay.
by anilgulecha - Not yet, but we're actively working exactly toward this - group chats with the assistant, where people can see the session and take turns steering. We're exploring a peer-to-peer connection for it so there's no server in the middle, which keeps it consistent with the local-first setup.by segmenta
- I have a hunch that both OpenAI and Anthropic are building towards this very quickly. It's one of the startup ideas that will be killed overnight when it's "officially" launched. Claude Tag was just released which lets Claude participate in chats in Slack - only a matter of time until they move those chats out of Slack and into their own platform.
- Disclaimer: I'm part of the team building it
That's what Amp is built around!
By default conversations are shares in your team (you can also make them private), and the agent has access to them.
So you can do things like "how would $teammate think about this" and the agent will read your colleague's conversations with Amp to get a feel for that and evaluate your work based on that.
Or just figuring out what everyone is doing at the moment is much easier that way
by dhamidi - Rowboat markets itself as "local-first," but if you look in the actual codebase, transcription is Deepgram cloud, voice is ElevenLabs, analytics is PostHog, and the LLM is a cloud API.