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qm – Multiplayer agent harness for work
- chatichanayd 3mo ago[flagged]
- Drupon 3mo ago>We take contributions as human-written text, not code — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Describe the change you'd like informally in a .txt or .md file in adrs/, and if we're aligned we'll handle the implementation. Report vulnerabilities privately — see SECURITY.md, not a public issue. Starting to think people were right when they talked about our industry itself having an AI psychosis problem.
- cyanydeez 3mo agothe other option is to generate 5000+ open issues that no one cares are open. Also, it's a AI project; what, exactly, do you think they're going to try and do?
- meagher 3mo agoas a maintainer, seems nicer than getting a slop pr with no context.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoSounds to me they're asking people to basically at least put the starting stones to something that looks like a specification. Not a bad idea to gate the flurry of feature requests to people who actually can think 10-15 minutes about the feature they're suggesting/asking for.
- dgellow 3mo agoI tend to think we have an industry AI mania problem, but I’m not sure I understand what you find psychotic about this. I find it better to get a text suggestion or description of the change, then work on the implementation myself, even without using an agent, instead of reviewing LLM diffs that I know I will want to tweak to my taste
- jez 3mo agoSQLite has a conceptually similar contribution process: > the project does not accept patches from random people on the internet https://sqlite.org/copyright.html https://sqlite.org/copyright.html In their case, it's motivated by a desire to keep copyrighted code out of the SQLite implementation, but I'm sure it has a nice benefit of making it so that an extremely widely used project doesn't get drive by, low effort code review requests while still allowing the community to engage. Asking that "random people on the internet" don't sent code is not altogether a novel, post-AI idea.
- bityard 3mo agoAs someone who has maintained an open source project, I much prefer written bug reports and feature requests to drive-by PRs. (I almost don't even care if they are LLM-written.)
- dwedge 3mo agoI appreciate open source maintainers and understand that it's a lot of thankless work, and I know what I'm about to say comes off as (and probably is) ignorant but the hoops projects make me jump through to report hugs or security issues is often like working for corporate in terms of bureaucracy and a lot of times I just don't bother. I've reported a few dozen bugs so I'm not prolific here but also not speaking without any experience at all. And then you often have automation (eg. Debian) closing bugs because nobody looked at it and saying to reopen it if it's still a problem in the current release. Like I said, I do understand and appreciate how annoying it must be. But there are two ways to look at this, one is that it's free software a bug report is like a support request - and of course nobody should expect free support. The other way to look at it is that by reporting bugs I'm volunteering as QA for the project and the report is beneficial.
- epistasis 3mo agoI sometimes add a PR with the fix for a bug report I make, but the last few have been ignored in favor of the maintainer's own code. So I think I'll stop doing PRs and just point to code lines instead.
- bakugo 3mo agoSo, basically, > Please write our prompts for us
- john_strinlai 3mo agoi find something a bit funny in an ai project, written by ai, requiring human-written text with specific guidance to not use ai. "Given that coding agents write most underlying code now, we'd prefer PRs in the form of human-written text. [...] Please do not have AI artificially expand what you'd like to do into a formal proposal."
- warkdarrior 3mo agoThey specifically ask not to create/submit a formal proposal. I do not see any restriction on the use of AI otherwise.
- john_strinlai 3mo agoi read the emphasized "human-written" part, in combination with that last line, as a blanket restriction (for contributing). but perhaps i read it wrong.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoList of commits already include at least two contributors who are openly working with Claude on their code: https://github.com/yc-software/qm/commits/main/ https://github.com/yc-software/qm/commits/main/
- tptacek 3mo agoThe point is that they just want your prompts, not your code.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- john_strinlai 3mo agoyes, specifically they want purely human-written ones. i understand why they want their own agent to do the code, and i can see the reasoning behind it. but not allowing ai to format/tidy up/flesh out the proposal is the part that i thought was a little funny.
- yewenjie 3mo agoIs Hermes the best openclaw like agent as they mention running it before? Also, what are power uses really using openclaw like systems for?
- fassssst 3mo agoI think most people use it to poll their email and instant messages and whateva with an LLM
- azuanrb 3mo agoI'm currently using it to help me with my oncall, first responder to our any production alerts. It's not as efficient as coding agent by default, but it's been tremendously helpful to me.
- backscratches 3mo agoHermes is huge and packed with features you probably don't need. I prefer smaller one I can extend as necessary, there are so many on github now and it is fun to test them but have been impressed with dirge (https://github.com/dirge-code/dirge https://github.com/dirge-code/dirge) not affiliated. I have one reading my second tier RSS feeds and newsletters and giving me news/market updates filtered for things important to me
- nisegami 3mo agoI had the same line of thought and spent a while with nanoclaw before realizing that adding the features I want back in would have made future updates too painful. I ended up switching to Hermes and aggressively disabling tools/skills and it's been pretty fine so far. I got more use cases set up than I did in my time with nanoclaw.
- backscratches 3mo agoTotally fair, I still use Claude code for tasks since it is so polished. I think I just dont have that complicated of use cases so in the end performance should reflect my lightweight needs as the priority.
- argssh 3mo agoit says "Each deployment runs in the operator's own cloud account" But feels like its written to run on one mac/vm and carries same drawbacks of other similar platforms. I'd rather use Hermes/Openclaw for oss or closed managed agents like Tasklet or Prajvis
- jessejin 3mo ago[dead]
- kevinwang 3mo agoWhat is yc software?
- rytill 3mo agoSomeone from Y Combinator made some software. Must there be narrativization of everything?
- epistasis 3mo agoYes, please! I'd like to know more, for example why now?
- rytill 3mo agoAt least for me, I often have a hard time believing people’s stated reasons for whatever they’re doing. The substance <> narrative relationship is backwards a lot of the time. Someone does something for a nebulous multitude of reasons, and then post-hoc fits their decision-making into a logical explanation that sounds nice. There is some psychology research supporting this as well. I suppose if you see the narrative itself as part of the release, that might be interesting. But most of the time I’d rather just hear plainly and straightforwardly what the thing is. Or at the very least, I am very accepting of releases which do not include rationalization / narrativization and don’t think it’s required to include.
- dwedge 3mo agoI think it's the website you're on
- Finbarr 3mo agoA team of brilliant people who work at YC shipping products internally and externally.
- gyanchawdhary 3mo agoA team that pioneered writing small checks for outsized returns. AI is making that venture model a lot less attractive, so now they're building productivity software for the startups they once only invested in.
- moralestapia 3mo agoSweet, now YC itself will be the startup :D.
- josht 3mo agolooks like an internal tool that yc rushed out the door to minimize any most lost ground to Buzz. That said, I'd be curious what folks think comparing these two tools.
- knighthacker 3mo agoLove seeing this direction along with Buzz. The hardest problem in multiplayer agents, at least for us, has not been the agent loop. It is scoping and QM's per-person scopes plus shared rooms is a sane answer for a company-wide assistant. I build in the adjacent lane, AQ (aq.dev), a multiplayer coding harness where teams run Claude Code and Codex together), so seeing YC ship "a multiplayer agent harness for work" is validating and a little surreal.
- epistasis 3mo agoIt's fascinating to see new UI primitives and concepts get invented in the LLM era. The sea of creativity makes it hard to even understand most of what each new app does, and nobody describes them well. When I went to the Hermes agent web page, I was left with zero clue about what it did or what it could do. It took a bit of digging to find the right part of the qm page that helped me grok what was going on. I've become attached to Orca (yc-backed) for managing coding sessions in the past week, but some sort of postgres session db is what's really lacking. So, maybe it's time to try qm.
- j45 3mo agoAI needs entirely new primitives in many areas.
- jesol 3mo agoI think we need a new area of study around UI/Agent connection. It can kinda be done with tools, but I'd we need much deeper primitives to allow the UI to inform the Agent and vice-versa. Right now we've just given up, replacing the UI with an Agent message view, but I think that's just because nobody is thinking about how the two can compliment each other I've been playing around with using a hidden markov model informed by a UI state event stream, with the end state fed into the Agent as a hint on each message turn. Then the Agent can make a tool call to add events to the HMM. This has been really interesting, but I haven't struck the right balance to make it actually feel good for the user yet
- throwaway7783 3mo agoIsn't this the direction Claude on the web is going towards? It's a mix of message view on the left and specific interactive UI on the right panel. There is also MCP Apps spec now
- jychang 3mo agoIt's hard to say what is needed now, vs needed in a few years. For example, many rumors say SSI has solved learning and retaining state. That would significantly change AI requirements.
- wxw 3mo ago> We take contributions as human-written text, not code — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Describe the change you'd like informally in a .txt or .md file in adrs/, and if we're aligned we'll handle the implementation. Interesting approach to open source contributions. Closer to feature requests at that point?
- danielrmay 3mo agoInteresting to see they shipped an "anti-slop" taste skill: > description: Anti-slop frontend skill for landing pages, portfolios, and redesigns. The agent reads the brief, infers the right design direction, and ships interfaces that do not look templated. Real design systems when applicable, audit-first on redesigns, strict pre-flight check. > - *PREMIUM-CONSUMER PALETTE BAN (mandatory, second-most-recurring AI-tell):* - For premium-consumer briefs (cookware, wellness, artisan, luxury, heritage craft, DTC home goods, etc.)... - Backgrounds: `#f5f1ea`, `#f7f5f1`... > Landing pages and portfolios are *visual products*. Text-only pages with fake-screenshot divs are slop. https://github.com/yc-software/qm/blob/7f2c916360f1797a8ff2a77ce2ce40c5fabab087/skills-seed/taste-skill/references/tasteskill.md https://github.com/yc-software/qm/blob/7f2c916360f1797a8ff2a...
- thoughtpeddler 3mo agoDoesn’t this just lead to a new “basin of tastelessness” that, sure, looks different from current slop, but is itself just eventually slop all the same?
- namuol 3mo agoSo just an accelerated version of the standard UI design trends cycle (which is bad).
- brianjking 3mo agoYes.
- nojs 3mo ago> Em-dash (—) is COMPLETELY banned. It is the LLM's signature stylistic crutch and it is the #1 visual Tell in production tests. There is no "limited use" allowance, no "natural language frequency" allowance, no "in body copy is fine" allowance. None. I guess the em dash is really dead.
- dgunay 3mo agoI have been seeing people use it more who I am fairly confident are not otherwise using AI to write public-facing communications. It's almost like there's a minor movement to try and reclaim it. Either that or it's somehow getting past my AIdar.
- rvz 3mo agoOther than the hosting providers, who has made money directly from running OpenClaw in constant loops? This software appears to be yet another solution in search of a problem designed to burn as many tokens as possible.
- tclancy 3mo ago> Learn your writing voice from past sends, then triage your inbox on a schedule — labels and reply drafts included Oh grand. The world will be full of agents talking to agents and nothing getting done. So pretty much the same only I can just leave my machine awake to look busy.
- aatd86 3mo agoIf I had applied to yc, I would have thought they had "distilled" my startup idea xD
- qup 3mo agoIt's not very novel
- aatd86 3mo agoOk but then why did they ask for this in a Request For Startups?
- qup 3mo agoIf they asked for it, that's a big clue it's not a novel idea. They ask for it because they think it can unicorn. Being novel isn't always important.
- aatd86 3mo agoIf it is so not novel, why did I never see it in Enterprise? Why is their own attempt a barebone mvp? Besides Dassault Systemes or Palantir with their Ontology product, who was doing anything adjacent? It's giving typical HN vibes ' you don't need dropbox, just sync to ftp' ;D
- m463 3mo agonot a very helpful title? maybe: "qm - a multiplayer agent harness for work"
- tptacek 3mo agoIt's an HN-ism that it's OK for titles to make readers do a little work.
- 2001zhaozhao 3mo agoI'll need to explore how they're doing org wide context and security for sure. This seems extremely complementary to my own coding tool which currently gives the best AI interface for individuals. Would be cool if in a few epic tickets i'll have both their org wide architecture AND a productive individual coding interface :)
- hankbond 3mo agoJust want to thank the authors for the concise and consumable README.
- recsv-heredoc 3mo agoAren't there a ton of products already doing this? Why not just use claude Cowork? Surely they're simpler/better/more featureful/developed than the alternatives here? What advantage does this have? Would love to see a 'QM vs Cowork' comparison!
- bellowsgulch 3mo agoPeople are building state-of-the-art harnesses in private right now that outperform the average developers' harnesses, people using Claude Code, OpenCode, etc.
- kang 3mo agothis one is trying to cashin on the 'multiplayer' keyword after the buzz that 'no one has cracked multiplayer yet'. well the ui sucks and is not it.
- recsv-heredoc 3mo agoKinda makes sense. Multiplayer is at odds with async, generally speaking - and LLMs/agents really see their productivity rise up with async work.
- samtheprogram 3mo agoI disagree with this. If agents are doing asynchronous work, it's really an artifact anyone should be able to look at.
- recsv-heredoc 3mo agoRealtime multiplayer - to clarify the position.
- andersonpico 3mo agowhat does multiplayer means in this context?
- 3mo ago
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- eru 3mo agoI hope the other agents replied with 'This meeting could have been an email.'
- mellosouls 3mo agoIn a tangential earlier release, Gary Tan's own gstack: https://github.com/garrytan/gstack https://github.com/garrytan/gstack Use Garry Tan's exact Claude Code setup: 23 opinionated tools that serve as CEO, Designer, Eng Manager, Release Manager, Doc Engineer, and QA
- smartbit 3mo agoYC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815117 (July 5, 2026)
- Planktonne 3mo agoThis is the exact same as the breathless faddishness of celebrity news. "Use these seventeen different skincare products and you'll look exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow".
- bigbuppo 3mo agoOh sweet, nice to see someone writing about multivalue databases.
- sudb 3mo agoThis was literally in YC's Request For Startups for Fall 2026: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#multiplayer-ai https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#multiplayer-ai
- olitomas 3mo ago[flagged]
- nico 3mo agoCool. This also feels a lot like what copilot is doing. It’s nice that copilot integrates out of the box with teams/outlook/office, so it has great company/work context
- kurtis_reed 3mo ago"multiplayer"? Is this a game? I honestly don't know what that means in this context.
- gyanchawdhary 3mo agothis looks over engineered, gimmicky and lame. YC is clearly having a "crisis of meaning" in a post AI world
- beambot 3mo agoThis is (probably) a natural evolution of Garry's gbrain, a basic RAG for individual use. Gbrain is super useful as a starting point for an individual; this seems like an extension to a company. I've found gbrain to be very effective with meetily (instead of granola), vikunja for project planning, various mcp for email, etc. It's nice not being locked in to vendors and models... Thanks for making this OSS too.
- kaonwarb 3mo agoHeavy conclusion from a single OSS release
- gyanchawdhary 3mo agovibes.
- Kevcmk 3mo agoThis is smelling like an astroturfing campaign. This is a total nothing-burger
- buremba 3mo agoI love the concept to use different harness frameworks in qm but a true multiplayer harness needs to support other agents and any MCP clients, including Cowork. Making agents multiplayer is mostly a context problem. You could be using ChatGPT or a Slack bot, or a web interface and the agent needs to know you, your conversations in Cowork etc. so it can enable multi channel collaboration with your agents and your colleagues. We're working on it at https://lobu.ai https://lobu.ai
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- yohamta 3mo agoMultiplayer agent harness is useful only when the context and AI output does not overwhelm the team space and works asynchronously and background. If you think about it, that could be just boring job scheduler, isn't it?
- bigwhite 3mo agoThe design concepts of “qm” and “Block Buzz” share some similarities in their underlying principles.
- hn9rsvy2gx 3mo ago[dead]
- Adsnetworksucce 3mo ago[flagged]
- smolder 3mo agoFake, boring, non-accomplishment.
- cretinoid 3mo agoqm has been a qemu (virtualization) command line tool probably for 20 years or so. The ignorance of these people inside the same field is egregious. (Oh, yes, there can be tools that are named the same in the same field, I get it)
- bfeynman 3mo agoCan someone give me an example where this is truly and uniquely useful? I've seen so many of these things and I can't tell if part of it is like mostly for enabling nontechnical folks to do more things or if it's some unlock and additive value. At end of day beneath it all things are just prompts, and then you can provide tools and context, but even then that's not even something I've found that useful to keep because context windows are still limited and bias propagations often need to be constantly corrected, especially when digital artifacts are not perfect representations of the real world.
- dbmikus 3mo ago[dead]
- sheepscreek 3mo agoIt gives every employee their own personal assistant (AI agent). It learns their preferences, and more importantly, can access whatever they can.
- nylonstrung 3mo agoAnd what aspect of that is novel exactly?
- sheepscreek 3mo agoI didn’t imply it was novel.
- muretai 3mo ago[flagged]
- a-dub 3mo agoi'm curious what this gains in practice and usability over standard chatbot slack integration.
- myshapeprotocol 3mo ago[flagged]
- cyanregiment 3mo agoWhy does every online software say they are "multiplayer" now? And then like 90% of the time there's nobody "there", and it's barely even collaborative. If this is "multiplayer", does that make Chrome a Massively Multiplayer Online Browser? Is everything a game?
- krishna180 3mo agoLol. That's a good humour.
- saadn92 3mo agoPretty cool - I’ve also been doing something along the lines of this with lumifyhub but it includes docs and boards natively
- hmokiguess 3mo agoSo that explains why there is so much low effort cold outreach on LinkedIn from YC founders these days. It's getting ridiculous the amount of unsupervised agents doing active inbox management on things that should be personal relationship work. I'm so tired of it.
- abratabia 3mo ago[flagged]
- docheinestages 3mo agoA video would've been nice to walk through how it's actually used. I don't mean just a walkthrough after a fresh install, but an instance that's actively used.
- abratabia 3mo ago[flagged]
- alexzz11 3mo ago[flagged]
- zqm-sh 3mo agoIs it intended to support running on generic hosting?
- jessejin 3mo ago[flagged]
- tizerluo 3mo ago[flagged]
- nc55g3g 3mo ago[dead]
- jessejin 3mo agoWe’ve been deploying QM into customer AWS accounts (official Terraform path). Happy to answer AWS/ops questions. DIY vs managed cost sketch: https://digitize.llc/qm/calculator/ https://digitize.llc/qm/calculator/ · writeup: https://digitize.llc/qm/ https://digitize.llc/qm/
- kuanzema 3mo agoHow is QM trying to differentiate from HarnessRouter.ai, which launched on Launch YC about 10 days ago? https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/RpL-harnessrouter-bring-the-world-s-best-ai-agents-into-your-app-with-one-api https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/RpL-harnessrouter-bring... Both seem to provide a unified interface across different harnesses/models. HarnessRouter exposes that as a developer API for embedding agent-powered features into products, with Task / Run / Session / Streaming / File / Artifact / Renderer contracts, plus tracing around harness/model behavior over time. Is the main distinction that QM is a company workspace, while HarnessRouter is an embeddable harness layer for product teams and enterprises?
- sysguru2046 3mo agoI have a simple question - Is QM another integrated development platform like VS Code?
- beyondscaletech 3mo ago[flagged]