Check out Eve (https://eve.new). I saw it here on Hacker News after I decided OpenClaw was too raw for me. Eve is amazing. My theory as to why it's so good is that the founders have a strong background in design -- they met getting their masters in design at UC Berkeley. Their secret sauce is the harness they've constructed IMHO.
Here is what Zach Dive said in the original HN announcement--
Eve is an AI agent harness that runs in an isolated Linux sandbox (2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 10GB disk) with a real filesystem, headless Chromium, code execution, and connectors to 1000+ services.
You give it a task and it works in the background until it's done.
I built this because I wanted OpenClaw without the self-hosting, pointed at actual day-to-day work. I'm thinking less personal assistant and more helpful colleague.
The main interface is a web app where you can watch work happen in real time (agents spawning, files being written, use of the CLI). There's also an iMessage integration so you can fire a task asynchronously, put your phone down, and get a reply when it's finished.
Under the hood, there's an orchestrator (Claude Opus 4.6) that routes to the right domain-specific model for each subtask: browsing, coding, research, and media generation.
For complex tasks it spins up parallel sub-agents that coordinate through the shared filesystem. They have persistent memory across sessions so context compounds over time.
I've packaged it with a bunch of pre-installed skills so it can execute in a variety of job roles (sales, marketing, finance) at runtime.
This was not a pleasant experience to register with and evaluate. Nowhere is a Linux-deployable harness mentioned. It seems to be a Perplexity-like offering.
On top of that, users logging in with Google OIDC cannot delete their accounts. Eve asks for the login password to confirm account deletion. Broken.
I see your point. The others are self-hosted, and you bring your own key. Personally, I like the convenience Eve's online account provides. It's dead simple to be up and off to the races, getting useful work done with little effort. After struggling with OpenClaw, it has been a very pleasant experience. Several people in our company are using it now.
> I see your point. The others are self-hosted, and you bring your own key.
More importantly, they don't require an account with a company you don't know how long it'll exist.
It's less about "self-hosted vs not" and more about "If I start relying on this tool and the company eventually gets bought/sold/disappears/burns up, what can I do?"
On top of that, they're using wildly wrong TLD, it's not a generic fun TLD to do whatever with, it's specifically for doing a "New Action" in an existing platform. Gives me the impression they don't really know what they're doing.
I fed Claude the WSJ article, and asked it to come up with a summary I could post here. It sounded too much like AI wrote it. So I asked it to summarize again but sounding more like my voice and not an AI voice. It still failed, but I thought I'd post its summary anyway. It is a fascinating story.
"A college kid at RIT cracked one of the biggest cyberattacks ever seen, mostly from his dorm room. Benjamin Brundage mapped out a botnet called Kimwolf — 2 million hacked Android devices being rented out to launch massive DDoS attacks — by infiltrating hacker chat rooms and sweet-talking insiders with cat memes. His research eventually fed into a federal takedown. The feds are sending him a t-shirt. "
As a student I worked at a lab, and had a PDP-11/10 all to myself. But of course I desired more. I heard such wonderful things about the 11/34. Six years later I worked for a small company that was able to purchase a PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E. I had died and gone to heaven!!
My high school had a /34 running RSTS/E, with roughly a dozen terminals on-campus, mostly in the lab. Even in 1980, I recall my teacher warning about Y2K, though not yet named as such. Fast forward 20+ years, and I would set up SIMH, install RSTS/E on it, and discover that version 7.0, which was what I used at the time, was not Y2K-compatible.
"One time, this guy handed me a picture of him. He said, "Here's a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture is of you when you were younger. "Here's a picture of me when I'm older.", "You son of a bitch! How'd you pull that off? Let me see that camera!"
"Alcoholism is a disease, but it’s the only one you can get yelled at for having. 'Goddamn it, Otto, you’re an alcoholic!' 'Goddamn it, Otto, you have lupus!' One of those two doesn’t sound right."
Are you kidding me? Is there any one person giving better AI updates nowadays than Simonw? Back in the day, there used to be these EF Hutton commercials. There'd be some scene of a bunch of people. One person would say something like, “My broker says…” and another would respond, “Well, my broker is EF Hutton, and EF Hutton says…”. And the whole restaurant or whatever would get silent so they could hear what EF Hutton says. It was great!
I feel the same way about Simon Willison. He's a treasure!
Here's a few of those EF Hutton commercials for your viewing pleasure--
We're a 33-year-old small company, with thirty employees. I started the company in 1992 to do custom programming (VB and MS Access) and network support (Novell NetWare). I slowly grew to five employees. In 2000 I did not enjoy billing out our hours, so I decided to develop a product -- a web-based issue tracking application to help with IT support. The transition from a services business to a product business was much more difficult than I anticipated, but we made it. Now Issuetrak is doing fine. From what I read on Hacker News, there are nice aspects to working in a small company. We have no outside investment, so we call our own shots. Everyone is close to the customers. We listen to all team members' ideas. Everyone knows who is contributing. We can work from home. After 25 years of taking customer suggestions, our product is robust. We provide prompt, very good telephone support. We win deals (and lose them too) against competitors that are 400 times our size. One of the biggest satisfactions is that when we survey our customers after each support encounter, it is not unusual to hear them say that Issuetrak is the best software company they've ever dealt with. My salary is probably less than that of many FANG engineers, but life is good.
The notion of "what is small" is interesting.
I think of small mom and pop shops.
But compared to the "giants" of which there are several
30 is really small.
The US SBA (Small Business Administration) has a table of industries with their definition of small using either dollar amount of receipts or number of employees:
This link is fascinating. I had no idea that the U.S. government definition of small business was so elaborate. I asked ChatGPT, and it turns out there are 978 industries, covered by 102 different size standards! Why did they come up with this? If a company meets their criteria, it can qualify for government contracts, loans, grants, advocacy programs and more.
According to ChatGPT:
To come up with this list, the U.S. Census Bureau provides detailed information on industries, including employment, revenue, and business structure. SBA economists analyze factors like average firm size, capital intensity, and industry concentration to determine reasonable thresholds for “small businesses.” They study the competition between small and large businesses in federal procurement, considering small businesses’ ability to compete for contracts. The annual budget for the SBA is $1 billion. This does not include $50 billion in various loan programs.
I think a company is small whilst all the employees could conceivably fit into a house party. That is perhaps a better metric here in the UK where there are fewer colossal houses. But hopefully you get the idea.
I would say below 50 employees is small, not quite mom&pop but small enough that you know everyone and there aren’t different separate “departments” in the company.
Also what is medium. Currently working with company having couple hundred employees. Doing consulting and own products. Small compared to thousands or tens of thousand of large companies in field. But not anymore small even by EU rules...
Thank you for turning me on to Atlas Obscura! I downloaded the app, and have already marked several places I want to visit, and others that I've been to. Looking forward to working with it more!
I happened to have been in Thailand recently, and came across these statues holding up traffic lights. I found it fascinating that a city council would devote resources to something like this. I'm looking forward to seeing other treasures that Atlas Obscura has.
When on the "My Designs" list, if you choose the vertical three dots way on the right, Delete is spelled Detele. Other than that, well even with that, you've come up with an amazing app!!
Here is what Zach Dive said in the original HN announcement--
Eve is an AI agent harness that runs in an isolated Linux sandbox (2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 10GB disk) with a real filesystem, headless Chromium, code execution, and connectors to 1000+ services.
You give it a task and it works in the background until it's done.
I built this because I wanted OpenClaw without the self-hosting, pointed at actual day-to-day work. I'm thinking less personal assistant and more helpful colleague.
The main interface is a web app where you can watch work happen in real time (agents spawning, files being written, use of the CLI). There's also an iMessage integration so you can fire a task asynchronously, put your phone down, and get a reply when it's finished.
Under the hood, there's an orchestrator (Claude Opus 4.6) that routes to the right domain-specific model for each subtask: browsing, coding, research, and media generation.
For complex tasks it spins up parallel sub-agents that coordinate through the shared filesystem. They have persistent memory across sessions so context compounds over time.
I've packaged it with a bunch of pre-installed skills so it can execute in a variety of job roles (sales, marketing, finance) at runtime.
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