alt Hacker NewsA lot of use cases for agents require long running sessions. And you're likely to have many agent sessions running in parallel. These aren't going to be running on your personal devices
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Durability and parallelism aren't that hard, and you won't be needing frontier models for much of this stuff. The parameter efficiency of models is increasing rapidly. I don't see why a (near-)future device wouldn't be capable of running a perfectly capable personal assistant.
I agree. I currently do run a bunch of dev containers on my local Docker but that is not good enough, they neeed to be able to work while I am on the run and close my laptop. So we are trying having personal containers on a managed Kibernetes cluster for every developer. We’re still working on making this work but it seems promising, the hardest thing being just permissions to let the agent use MCP servers, http APIs etc. If anyone has done this, how did you manage that?? I know there are products like OpenCLI that help with the problem but we want something we can build ourselves since AI makes it so much easier to build things!
Why not? Why wouldn't your phone be able to do this?
The other advantage long running sessions have is that very low tok/s are perfectly acceptable. In fact, hardly noticeable.
(aside, of course, from Google and Apple both having incentives to prevent this from happening, as both depend on selling centralized services to you and advertisers, and the local model breaks both)
My personal solution to this is to run DSH in an Incus VM on a local machine, then expose the web UI to the internet through my VPS (with some extra auth). I also made a couple of UI tweaks so it works better as a PWA.
Now I have persistent chats and a persistent environment that I can talk to from any device, including my phone. Even have X11 + CUA + Chromium inside the VM so the agent can use a real browser for sites that require it. DSH bwrap is the first layer of containment, VM is the second layer. I can swap between API models and local inference with a drop-down in the UI.
I realise this is way more setup than Meta's customers would tolerate, but the HN crowd could slap something together quite quickly. Using a coding agent with a nice chat UI as your general chat client is surprisingly smooth: just create an empty workspace.
I think Muse is the right shape in a lot of ways but I come unstuck at the point where my personal details and credentials are inside the VM.