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.

That hunch is probably right - the labs are likely building towards this. However, our bet is that in knowledge work the labs don't have a structural advantage: the model isn't the product there, unlike coding where it mostly is - and even in coding, opencode and others are gaining real traction.

What they do have is funding and distribution, but that's the same advantage every incumbent has against every startup.

The single biggest advantage we have is that the labs are tied to their ecosystems. Claude still doesn't have image generation; Gemini-flash-lite is the best cheap model, but Gemini's apps can't use the latest models from Anthropic or OpenAI. We can always use the best tool for each job.

Disclaimer: I'm part of the team building it

That's what Amp is built around!

By default conversations are shares in your team (you can also make them private), and the agent has access to them.

So you can do things like "how would $teammate think about this" and the agent will read your colleague's conversations with Amp to get a feel for that and evaluate your work based on that.

Or just figuring out what everyone is doing at the moment is much easier that way

Rather than a single application, is it possible to run a VM and have multiple remote access sharing one login session?

I get that great pains have been made to make sure that doesn't happen by default. But if you really want to co-op on something, why not at the session level on a dedicated VM/login pair?

Today the UI and the server run as a single app. We're working on separating that, so you could technically have one server with multiple clients. But even then, for collaboration with others, there are two issues with sharing a login session: (1) the system doesn't know these are two separate people, and (2) it has access to someone's email etc. - if it doesn't know who the user is, everyone gets the same access and can run anything.

That's why we're exploring a peer-to-peer setup for group chats instead. Each person keeps their own machine and data, and the assistant knows who's who and can ask the primary user for permission if the secondary user wants to run something non-trivial.

This isn't exactly what you're looking for but for just the coding part, I am working on https://www.buildautomaton.com to allow multiple people to participate on a shared coding session. It's also bring your own agent subscription, uses ACP to talk to any agent (Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc), and is end-to-end encrypted for most of your IP.

Looks great, but the pricing model is a challenge for a small team. If there was a generous trial period (for testing) with a lower small team price I might be able to consider it, but it’s hard to justify constantly increasing AI and compute costs (already paying for several model subscriptions, existing orchestration tools… in addition to typical infrastructure)

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.

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.

I use a tool called linzumi for this

...tmux?

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.

Thanks for the straight answer, sadly I use neither of those providers. As a suggestion: maybe you could add an option to just disable e-mail integration, for users like me? Right now I'll be getting, "finalize your app setup" vibes... forever.

Again, great app - all the best for the future!

That's totally fair. We will try to add a way to disable email if you don't want to connect. Appreciate the kind words!

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 get to harvest additive features/data from rowboat on top?

Edit - my typical approach would be to scrape out features from a tool like this to bolt onto my harness, why would I not do that here?

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 and use it. It can update it as well, but you would need to explicitly ask it to do so.

I'm happy to onboard you over a call if you'd like (you can DM me on Discord).

That's fair and you can do that. We built Rowboat with the principle that the whole should be better than the sum of the parts - the email client, notetaker, and surfaces all write back into one knowledge graph, which then improves each of them. So it's much better if you use Rowboat end to end.

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!

The growing problem with this and many other AI offerings is the asymmetry of effort.

All of them take my notes, meeting transcripts, jira tickets, code, websites, and give me more to read.

Then everyone else in the org is doing the same, to give me more to read. At the end of the day there is too much to read.

AI is supposed to be reducing toil, but it's just making more.

Fair point. But our goal with Rowboat is to do the opposite, to distill down only the parts you care about. For instance, you are not expected to read meeting notes, the important parts from it are added to your knowledge graph. That way next time you want to know something like 'where are we on x', you can find exactly that without having to wade through irrelevant information to get there.

Have you tried having AI read it for you? /s

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 actually was using this quite a lot earlier this year, thanks for this!

What I actually ended up doing was regularly pointing Claude at the Rowboat directory. Really useful to have all of this context available as markdown files.

I use my own standard format for all context capsules, and had my own branch running with that format hacked in.

Being able to describe the format in a plugin style architecture would be awesome.

Granola notes silently stopped working when they decided to encrypt the DB, interesting to see you've got your own in there now.

Will check it out again.

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.

Would love to see your context capsule format. We could definitely make it possible to describe your own format.

Granola no longer working was what led us to build it natively.

Welcome back. Would love your thoughts on the product.

This is neat, excited to try it. Over the last months I’ve been exclusively using Codex for non-coding tasks. It’s not bad, but there’s much to improve. This seems like a step in the right direction!

Thanks! Would love to hear what you think, after you get a chance to try it.

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

Update. It has a lot of potential ( and it did get better since I remember it from the original ShowHN ). There are pieces missing, but this may be a project to which I can happily contribute the pieces I think are missing.

That's great to hear! Would love your contributions. Please feel free to find us or DM me on Discord if you want to have a quick chat on anything.

This looks great, but let's see if I have this right ...

The "Agent Apps" (or whatever we are calling them) from the big vendors are organized around projects/folders, and we attach apps (via plugins) to the projects.

This appears to mae the apps (work surfaces) the primary artifact?

Yes, that's mostly right.

Surfaces are the primary artifact for collaborating with the assistant - each one attaches an app to a workflow and gives both you and the agent a structured place to work, instead of everything flowing through chat.

Chat is still first class, and projects/folders exist separately to organize work around it.

Really cool, how long did something like this take to build?

Another wrapper . Guys please build something real, AI cost too much $$ to just keep building things that already exist.

love this. will try this out.

Thanks, would love your feedback after trying it.

this is the first harness ive been excited to try in a while. looks pretty feature rich and suits most of my needs.

Thanks, that's great to hear. Would love to know how it goes once you've tried it - and if anything's missing for your setup, let us know (we are active on Discord).