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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

#52

Post by sdoering »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #46
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 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.

I seem to remember GitHub working on something similar. I remember having seen a video from a conference talk someone at GH gave at an European AI conference a while back. She presented some current prototype/early version they were working in. Where AI was basically like a team member in a chat interface with access to the task boards, issue tickets and also the whole conversation of the team, if I remember correctly.

Also different members of the team could steer/approve what the AI did or did not do.

Ahhh found the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClWD8OEYgp8

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

#53

Post by thunfischtoast »

segmenta wrote: post #41
dr_hooo wrote: 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.

What I would find lovely is to connect my already existing Thunderbird profile that exists locally. I have 5 email accounts connected and there is no real need to sync them twice on the same machine.

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

#54

Post by amanharshx »

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?

You might want to take a look at AionUI. Its a desktop app. I was an early contributor there and they do seem to work on like AI collaborations conversations rather than a single user only chat.

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

#56

Post by segmenta »

_puk wrote: post #50
segmenta wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Wou…

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.

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

#58

Post by segmenta »

thunfischtoast wrote: post #53
segmenta wrote: post #41

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.

What I would find lovely is to connect my already existing Thunderbird profile that exists locally. I have 5 email accounts connected and there is no real need to sync them twice on the same machine.

That is a neat idea. We could tap into the locally-synced Thunderbird files for the knowledge graph, which would make ingestion straightforward. We could explore this. The write side - pre-creating drafts on threads, sending etc. still needs the provider work that made us defer IMAP for all email handling.
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