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Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

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Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

#21

Post by starcalleryisss »

segmenta wrote: post #19
starcalleryisss wrote: post #18

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 ge…

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…

That makes sense but I guess the biggest rub for me is… do my existing skills become contradictory or overlapping with what rowboat is doing… I guess I’d want to be able to actually read the skills rowboat employs and marry them with mine so that there’s no double work and there’s an opportunity for rowboats features to be additively beneficial.

Will take you up on that! Thank you!

Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

#22

Post by dannyobrien »

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?

Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

#24

Post by segmenta »

starcalleryisss wrote: post #21
segmenta wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That makes sense but I guess the biggest rub for me is… do my existing skills become contradictory or overlapping with what rowboat is doing… I guess I’d want to be able to actually read the skills rowboat employs and marry them with mine so that there’s no double work and there’s an opportunity for rowboats features to be additively beneficial. Will take you up on that! Thank you!

You can read all the built-in skills today in https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat/tree/main/apps/x/pack...

Each skill lives in its own subfolder with a skill.ts, and they're registered in the catalog at skills/index.ts.

And we're releasing an update shortly that makes them all readable and editable directly in the app, so merging yours with Rowboat's the way you describe becomes straightforward. Looking forward to the call!

Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

#25

Post by segmenta »

dannyobrien wrote: post #22

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?

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.

Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

#26

Post by binsquare »

dannyobrien wrote: post #22

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?

I use a tool called linzumi for this

Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

#27

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

Super neat; will test. Initial read suggests the memory accretion continues indefinitely. Asking partially since I am still working on a personal way to deal with that as an issue:

Any plans for a more opinionated way to handle memory ( but still within user's control )?

edit: syntax

Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

#28

Post by segmenta »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #27

Super neat; will test. Initial read suggests the memory accretion continues indefinitely. Asking partially since I am still working on a personal way to deal with that as an issue: Any plans for a more opinionated way to handle memory ( but still within user's control )? edit: syntax

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop

#30

Post by anilgulecha »

dannyobrien wrote: post #22

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?

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.

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