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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

#61

Post by ramnique »

thih9 wrote: post #57

How does sandboxing work for code? Is there a way to control the isolation myself, e.g. let it run code only in some VM that I provide? Edit: is there a sandbox for code?

There's no app-enforced sandbox today. However, coding tasks get delegated to Claude Code or Codex using ACP.

- Codex runs under its native OS sandbox (Seatbelt on macOS, bubblewrap on Linux) — where it's sandboxed to the selected working directory with network off. - Claude Code's sandbox is opt-in and we don't enable it yet, but we load your Claude config (~/.claude/settings.json), so if you've enabled sandboxing there it should work.

Surfacing these options in the app UI is a small change on our side, which we'll pick up shortly.

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

#62

Post by iparaskev »

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?

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.

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

#63

Post by _puk »

segmenta wrote: post #56
_puk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The format is: https://contextcapsules.com/v2/CONTEXT_CAPSULES.md Context Capsules cover business concepts (even org structure), all the way through to implementation. Compounding value from bounded context. I implemented the Granola Sync when rowboat stopped pulling it in (I have a year's worth of transcripts of pretty much every conversation I've had over the past year). One shot granola sync in both TypeScript and…

This is brilliant, thanks for sharing! We're exploring a company brain - team-level context rather than just individual, and the context capsule seems like a great way to distill the individual knowledge graph into team level useful context! Thanks for the Granola script. Yep, I never imagined markdown would be the killer format.

I'll be watching closely, we're moving this way very quickly. If you get there it'll save me a job!

One thought, the knowledge graph rowboat creates is passive, based on context in emails, transcripts etc. A tool to pull further context from an individual would be amazing. Sit there and chat with it to flush out all of the tribal knowledge (gotchas in this spec).

We have Context Capsules running in production as agent context (amongst other layers of governance) to define metrics etc, so we can guarantee what you see in your dashboard matches exactly what your invoice says, what we're reporting externally, regardless of who is reporting it. Agent or human.

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

#66

Post by rglullis »

segmenta wrote: post #9
stevenally wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI should be doing the reading, then deciding what to do, then doing it, right? While you are at the beach, or unemployed. That's what Sam says.

I would like to be on the beach. But seems like people are working more and not less with AI. Somebody needs to care enough.

> But seems like people are working more and not less with AI.

Overall productivity hasn't increased, has it? At best there are cases of increased per productivity due to layoffs, at worst it's just busywork.

> Somebody needs to care enough.

Why?

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

#67

Post by Pxtl »

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?

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.

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

#69

Post by segmenta »

_puk wrote: post #63
segmenta wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is brilliant, thanks for sharing! We're exploring a company brain - team-level context rather than just individual, and the context capsule seems like a great way to distill the individual knowledge graph into team level useful context! Thanks for the Granola script. Yep, I never imagined markdown would be the killer format.

I'll be watching closely, we're moving this way very quickly. If you get there it'll save me a job! One thought, the knowledge graph rowboat creates is passive, based on context in emails, transcripts etc. A tool to pull further context from an individual would be amazing. Sit there and chat with it to flush out all of the tribal knowledge (gotchas in this spec). We have Context Capsules running in production as agen…

Thanks - would love to have this work for you.

This is a great idea. Almost like an interview mode where the assistant asks pointed questions (using your capsule spec as a guideline) and writes the answers back into the graph.

And thanks for the production context - this is not something we would have come up with. So really helpful data point.

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

#70

Post by segmenta »

rglullis wrote: post #66
segmenta wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to be on the beach. But seems like people are working more and not less with AI. Somebody needs to care enough.

> But seems like people are working more and not less with AI. Overall productivity hasn't increased, has it? At best there are cases of increased per productivity due to layoffs, at worst it's just busywork. > Somebody needs to care enough. Why?

On productivity: I feel the baseline for productivity has moved up. As a personal anecdote, I had a startup before with 25+ engineers. Now we are a startup of 2 co-founders and a couple of interns, and if I step back, I feel we can produce a surprising amount of stuff. But producing is just the input side, which brings me to 'care'.

On somebody needs to care enough: I meant that AI agents by design have no intrinsic motivations, so (stating the obvious) they do not really care if the product works or actually solves the user's problem. This puts the onus on the human to care for the problem to really solve it, vs just building something. With increased AI output there are too many things to care about which the AI won't, and I believe that's why people might be working more and not less

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