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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

#103
post #101

Does this support using only private LLM instances? Does it integrate with Amazon Bedrock?

You can use both private LLM instances or hosted ones. On private we support Ollama, LM Studio and any OpenAI compatible API.

In hosted, we support: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway.

No native Amazon Bedrock support, but you could use OpenRouter or LiteLLM with the Bedrock key and point Rowboat to that today.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think we are talking about the same thing and reaching wildly different conclusions. If "producing is just the input side" and you still need people to check if the product really solves the user's problems, then I get to conclude that the bottleneck has never been the "generating the code" part of the work, and actual productivity - i.e, delivering things that actually solves the customer's problem - is pretty much the same.

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

#105
post #36

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?

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.

85%* of small to midsize biz in United States are on Microsoft's office platform, not Google Workspace and Gmail.

starting with indies and SV startups and education is less risky, but the real market outside startup culture is often overlooked by those who came up inside that culture

generic IMAP is not worth the time, first class integration with M365 is worth the time

OIDC flavor "Continue with Microsoft" should be right there beside Continue with Google / Github / Whatever, on every SaaS that wants business clients small enough to make "sign up online" decisions. By contrast, for consumer, Continue with Apple would be the equivalently overlooked OIDC option if you are targeting "wallet share" (a revenue model) instead of headcount (an ad model, for instance).

* Didn't look this up. Used to be. Doesn't matter if 50% or 90%, it's substantial, and point stands: don't overlook it.

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think we are talking about the same thing and reaching wildly different conclusions. If "producing is just the input side" and you still need people to check if the product really solves the user's problems, then I get to conclude that the bottleneck has never been the "generating the code" part of the work, and actual productivity - i.e, delivering things that actually solves the customer's problem - is pretty muc…

I think we agree on the diagnosis: generating code was never the whole bottleneck. Where we differ is the conclusion. Work is implementation plus verification (specing, testing, checking it actually solves the problem). Pre-AI, implementation was so slow that verification hid inside its schedule - you verified while the next thing was being built. AI collapsed implementation time, so verification is now the exposed bottleneck - and the cheapest way teams absorb that today is more human hours. So: output per person is up, hours up too, and the delivered-value gain is real but smaller than the raw output gain suggests. Which I think explains both our observations.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

85%* of small to midsize biz in United States are on Microsoft's office platform, not Google Workspace and Gmail. starting with indies and SV startups and education is less risky, but the real market outside startup culture is often overlooked by those who came up inside that culture generic IMAP is not worth the time, first class integration with M365 is worth the time OIDC flavor "Continue with Microsoft" should be…

Makes a ton of sense, and the framing is correct - it's easy to build for the ecosystem you live in. We plan to add M365 (Outlook) soon. And noted on "Continue with Microsoft" at sign-in.

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

#108
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.

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