u/OriginalDull6713

From a psychological point of view, initiativity changes the assistant's role in the user's mental workflow.

Most tools wait passively, so the user still carries the cognitive load of remembering unfinished work, open questions, and moments when help might be useful. A proactive assistant can reduce that load by noticing when something deserves another look.

But initiative needs boundaries. Helpful initiative is not the same as taking control. A good colleague may prepare information or suggest a next step, but still respects your goals, timing, and authority.

That is why settings, limits, and instructions matter. They are part of trust. The assistant should be active enough to help, but predictable enough to feel safe.

I'm curious whether there's a real market for an AI chat designed for families or other small groups (friends, roommates, couples, project teams, etc.).

The idea is simple:

• Everyone has their own account and private chats.
• The AI maintains a shared memory that's accessible to the group.
• The group can also have shared conversations with the AI, almost like adding another participant to the chat.

Some examples:

1. Better recommendations through shared context

One person chats with the AI about dream holiday destinations. Later, someone else asks for gift ideas, and the AI suggests a surprise trip because it remembers what the first person was excited about.

2. Shared context

One family member asks the AI for directions to the science museum after school. Later, another asks, "Do you remember what Alison was planning today?" The AI recalls the earlier conversation and mentions the museum. (Assuming everyone has agreed to share this information.)

3. AI as part of the conversation

Instead of switching between Messenger and ChatGPT, the group opens one shared AI chat. Everyone discusses holiday plans, purchases, or other decisions together, while the AI already knows the group's preferences and past conversations.

Would you actually use something like this?

• What would be your main use case?
• Would shared memory be useful or feel too invasive?
• Would you pay for a family/group subscription?
• Have you seen any products that already do this well?

I'm curious whether there's a real market for an AI chat designed for families or other small groups (friends, roommates, couples, project teams, etc.).

The idea is simple:

• Everyone has their own account and private chats.
• The AI maintains a shared memory that's accessible to the group.
• The group can also have shared conversations with the AI, almost like adding another participant to the chat.

Some examples:

1. Better recommendations through shared context

One person chats with the AI about dream holiday destinations. Later, someone else asks for gift ideas, and the AI suggests a surprise trip because it remembers what the first person was excited about.

2. Shared context

One family member asks the AI for directions to the science museum after school. Later, another asks, "Do you remember what Alison was planning today?" The AI recalls the earlier conversation and mentions the museum. (Assuming everyone has agreed to share this information.)

3. AI as part of the conversation

Instead of switching between Messenger and ChatGPT, the group opens one shared AI chat. Everyone discusses holiday plans, purchases, or other decisions together, while the AI already knows the group's preferences and past conversations.

Would you actually use something like this?

• What would be your main use case?
• Would shared memory be useful or feel too invasive?
• Would you pay for a family/group subscription?
• Have you seen any products that already do this well?

I'm curious whether there's a real market for an AI chat designed for families or other small groups (friends, roommates, couples, project teams, etc.).

The idea is simple:

• Everyone has their own account and private chats.
• The AI maintains a shared memory that's accessible to the group.
• The group can also have shared conversations with the AI, almost like adding another participant to the chat.

Some examples:

1. Better recommendations through shared context

One person chats with the AI about dream holiday destinations. Later, someone else asks for gift ideas, and the AI suggests a surprise trip because it remembers what the first person was excited about.

2. Shared context

One family member asks the AI for directions to the science museum after school. Later, another asks, "Do you remember what Alison was planning today?" The AI recalls the earlier conversation and mentions the museum. (Assuming everyone has agreed to share this information.)

3. AI as part of the conversation

Instead of switching between Messenger and ChatGPT, the group opens one shared AI chat. Everyone discusses holiday plans, purchases, or other decisions together, while the AI already knows the group's preferences and past conversations.

Would you actually use something like this?

• What would be your main use case?
• Would shared memory be useful or feel too invasive?
• Would you pay for a family/group subscription?
• Have you seen any products that already do this well?

Every time you talk to an LLM and it calls a tool, searches the web, or remembers what you said earlier — that's a harness at work.

The harness is everything around the model. It manages context, decides which tools to offer, handles retries, enforces permissions, and keeps the loop running. The model itself is just the brain — the harness is the nervous system.

Most people focus on picking the right model. After building a few agents, you realize the harness matters more. A good harness makes a mediocre model look capable. A bad harness makes a great model look unusable.

As models improve, the harness becomes the bottleneck. Worth paying attention to.

If you've tried OpenClaw, Hermes, or anything in the "agent harness" space — you've probably noticed they all share the same set of promises and the same set of pain points.

I'm part of a small team exploring a fresh take on this, and before we commit to a direction, I want to hear from people who actually use this stuff daily.

A few things we're thinking about:

• What if the brain lived in a single lightweight container and you connected devices to it — rather than giving one machine full agent control? (Security by architecture, not by policy.)
• What if tools could push events to the agent, instead of the agent always polling or running cron? (Inbox zero for your agent — it only acts when something actually happens.)
• What if an agent had a configurable initiative level — from "never act on your own" to "occasionally look for useful things to do when idle"? (Instead of scheduled tasks that you define.)
• What if you could have multiple agent brains in different physical locations talking to each other? (Distributed by design.)

But here's the thing — we don't want to build in a vacuum. So I'm genuinely asking:

1. What's the ONE thing your current agent tool can't do that you desperately need?
2. What's overengineered and could be stripped away?
3. What's undercooked and needs real attention?

If you use OpenClaw — what frustrates you most? If you use Hermes — what's missing? If you've tried both — what would your ideal hybrid look like?

Not looking for upvotes. Looking for real takes.

Here's what I'm wondering: would you trust your AI assistant to just... randomly decide to do something useful?

Not a scheduled task. Not something you told it to do. But it sits there, notices you're away, looks at what's been going on, and thinks "hey, maybe I should draft a reply to that email" or "looks like that task stalled, let me move it forward."

We're building DMJBot, and we're considering adding exactly this — an "initiative" mode. It would be fully controllable — you decide how much or how little it does on its own. The core guardrails:

• Only activates when you're idle — never interrupts your work
• You write the rules — "never send anything", "don't touch finances", whatever makes you comfortable
• There's a hard daily cap so it can't go wild with tokens use

But I keep going back and forth. Half of me thinks this would be genuinely useful. The other half thinks people will hate the idea of an AI doing anything without being asked.

So — would you want this? Or is it a hard no? What would make it feel safe enough to try?

Here's what I'm wondering: would you trust your AI assistant to just... randomly decide to do something useful?

Not a scheduled task. Not something you told it to do. But it sits there, notices you're away, looks at what's been going on, and thinks "hey, maybe I should draft a reply to that email" or "looks like that task stalled, let me move it forward."

We're building DMJBot, and we're considering adding exactly this — an "initiative" mode. It would be fully controllable — you decide how much or how little it does on its own. The core guardrails:

• Only activates when you're idle — never interrupts your work
• You write the rules — "never send anything", "don't touch finances", whatever makes you comfortable
• There's a hard daily cap so it can't go wild with tokens use

But I keep going back and forth. Half of me thinks this would be genuinely useful. The other half thinks people will hate the idea of an AI doing anything without being asked.

So — would you want this? Or is it a hard no? What would make it feel safe enough to try?

I started building a personal AI assistant about a year ago — before OpenClaw really took off. At the time I was sure this is something devs would need: an AI that runs in the background, connects your tools, executes tasks automatically.

Then OpenClaw got popular, which seemed to prove the idea was right. But now I'm second-guessing. What actually made people want OpenClaw? What problem were you hoping to solve? Does it deliver, or is there still a gap?

I'm not trying to clone it. I want to build something better, with a different approach. My tool is called DMJBot (working name). Main differences:

• Works when you're away — an AI assistant shouldn't only respond when you type in a chat. It should keep working while you sleep, exercise, or focus on other things. We're adding an Initiative feature that lets you control how often the assistant acts on its own — from fully passive (only when asked) to proactively suggesting and doing things independently.
• Host anywhere — a $5 VPS, a Raspberry Pi, or even inside a Docker container on your existing web server, fully free. Doesn't need a full desktop running 24/7 like OpenClaw does.
• Multiple devices, one brain — connect your home server, work laptop, and cloud instance to the same assistant. It knows your whole setup.
• Event-driven — it reacts automatically to events (new email, file change, sensor trigger) instead of waiting for you to ask.

But I'm at a point where I need to know: is this actually something people want? Why did you try OpenClaw in the first place, and what was missing? Would you trust an AI assistant running 24/7 that acts on your behalf?

Would love honest thoughts from fellow builders.