Munder Difflin – Agent harness to run an office of your clones

Hey guys, thanks for putting it here, I am Chaitanya I built Munder Difflin, I am here to answer all your questions(except nylonstrung).

For people who haven't tried it: Munder Difflin is a local multi-agent harness that wraps around your existing claude code and codex subscriptions(we literally support almost all harnesses/coding agents).

Simulations are deterministic, they do not consume tokens, infact most of the users(20K+ in a week) say that it has reduced their token consumption due to a benchmarked memory layer acting as a hive mind called mempalace.

Common use cases apart from coding: 1. Create triggers that runs an live agent with your context(Webhooks, slack, scheduled) 2. Almost any kind of automation for yourself(I make it review PRs, send cold emails with enriched context, manage discord, Send myself analytics about how app is doing on email an end to end AI video production and posting workflow in 1 prompt and then some)

I'd love to hear your feedbacks on it.

This is cute and fucked up at the same time.

I've thought about something like this. When there is a lot of stuff happening at once, it's a mistake to try and communicate it all with text. Agents use tools, reference databases, reference the web, interact with other agents, and spend time processing the information. When you have several agents operating at the same time, communicating what they are doing using some kind of spatial map is a really smart idea.

The office is a decent analog for such a map. Referencing a database? That operation along with processing the information takes a little bit of time. During the interval, have the avatar move to a file cabinet and back to their desk. Have their computer screen change when they access web resources. If they use a particular tool, it can be represented somewhere in the room and used the same way. Interacting with another agent can be similarly represented.

Symbolizing the operation of the agent with movement and behavior is a great way to give an overview. It would support a much richer intuition for how they are accomplishing a task. It wouldn't even need to be a game UI for people who will have a hard time feeling like they are doing serious work while watching what appears to be a game, but that wouldn't bother me.

This is fantastic. As the little joke I hope it is. Everyone gets their own small disfunctional group, and gets to figure out the challenges of management. You, the manager, are Michael. You know you have to produce something, and you do, but you have no real idea of how. Your diligent agents are Dwight. Overly literal sycophants that are ready to leap to action at your slightest command without any question.

I do think a lot of folk would benefit from the introspection this offers. We've all been given the opportunity to become middle (and middling) managers, and a lot of the challenges we face are those of people who direct. Setting direction is tough. But LLMs are awesome tools.

If this dropped just five years ago no one would understand what on earth this software does . In many ways I still don't. Incredible the development we've seen lately, wonder what will stick and what won't?

This is super cute. I haven't tried it or anything but it's really fun, seems genuinely useful too. I don't really get people calling it cringe.

I guess I wouldn't use it, but I just bought two of the asset packs of the pixel artist instead.

This project is cringe and I really hope we see less stuff like this

an office of your clones. next they'll add a clone HR department to handle the clone performance reviews, and a clone IT guy who's also a clone and keeps filing tickets against himself.

Is it just me or do AI made websites tend to be too verbose?

I guess I wouldn't use it, but I just bought two of the asset packs of the pixel artist instead.

This is super cute. I haven't tried it or anything but it's really fun, seems genuinely useful too. I don't really get people calling it cringe.

This project is cringe and I really hope we see less stuff like this

They're thinking it's serious like Gas Town, that's why

People who who "cringe" as an adjective are cringeworthy, and I hope we hear less from them.

I wouldn't call it cringe but I don't think it adds a lot of value, distracts me even more & even pulls unnecessary resources I'd guess?

but if people need some tamagochis to look at while their AI is working, maybe it makes sense

The next steps in innovation will occur at the harness level. Why not have some fun while we’re at it?

I hope we see fewer comments like this that aren't shitting on projects that you have no stake in anyway

an office of your clones. next they'll add a clone HR department to handle the clone performance reviews, and a clone IT guy who's also a clone and keeps filing tickets against himself.

Can't be worse then the preformative just-have-to-be-done newage bs HR reviews in modern big corpo landscape.

The next steps in innovation will occur at the harness level. Why not have some fun while we’re at it?

I wouldn't call it cringe but I don't think it adds a lot of value, distracts me even more & even pulls unnecessary resources I'd guess?

but if people need some tamagochis to look at while their AI is working, maybe it makes sense

I hope we see fewer comments like this that aren't shitting on projects that you have no stake in anyway

This is a business--they have cloud and a sales team.

Fair. I'll rm the personal project bit

Eh, so what? It's whimsical and fun, and it's better if more things like this exist in the world than not.

Fair. I'll rm the personal project bit

Eh, so what? It's whimsical and fun, and it's better if more things like this exist in the world than not.

They’re literally reusing IP from The Office. It’s clearly not parody, and they directly reference the show. It’s one thing for a joke project to do that. They are attempting to profit off someone else’s creative work. And not even in the roundabout way AI does.

This is cute and fucked up at the same time.

Hey guys, thanks for putting it here, I am Chaitanya I built Munder Difflin, I am here to answer all your questions(except nylonstrung).

I'd love to hear your feedbacks on it.

Can't be worse then the preformative just-have-to-be-done newage bs HR reviews in modern big corpo landscape.

People who who "cringe" as an adjective are cringeworthy, and I hope we hear less from them.

It's interesting but It was hard to tell from a quick read if this was a fun game with LLMs or a productivity tool. You could stand to make that more clear.

“send cold emails with enriched context”

What’s the difference between cold and spam?

When you say no code leaves your machine, how does code get evaluated by your LLM of choice? Doesn't Claude see your code when you send a prompt just like it usually does?

Cool project! I’m still trying to figure out if this sort of thing is the future, or something that the big AI labs will subsume into their products on their own soon. Or something that won’t be necessary in a few months when LLMs get smarter.

I don't want to contact you for pricing.

Does it work with local LLMs?

when did you launch, how many users you have, and what's the business metrics if you don't mind sharing.

How is this different from a Hermes agent? Any major pro? Besides the cute graphics.

And why do you need E2E encrypted comms between your own agents? What is that protecting against? To prevent other agents snooping and maybe getting derailed? Or do you support conversations between agents of different users?

What an exciting project, Chai. Congratulations on your work.

don't let the crankles get you down. this thing is delightful.

Discovery is part of good design. It is easy to confuse complexity with sophistication.

Why does everyone assume people in the past were idiots? They probably would have figured out what this was for after some critical thinking. Remember those people wrote massive complicated software by hand.

Insightful. I think I’d do better at this orchestration at this particular stage of technology development if I named all my agents Dwight, maybe with an occasional Creed.

Not feeling this. Is it necessary to call "agents" by human names? Wouldn't objectives be a safer easier to remember approach to naming? Like, say 'Clips' and 'Seeks'.

It is nice to see folks experimenting widely with unique visual representations of agent orchestration, as a consequence of the bottom-up / individual-led development that's driving the industry (inasmuch as it exists yet).

There are folks young enough now that they've never known anything other than "the desktop" (or CLI) as a computing metaphor.

But there's no fundamental reason a metaphor has to be anything specific... it should be whatever is most widely comprehensible and efficient for the problem space.

You are correct this is interesting but it is still quite obviously the wrong UI. For the same reason https://www.gather.town/ ends up being a waste of time.

It's been done before with LLMs. In both cases - human and LLM - trying to "visualize" what people are working on by having a topdown office view is a complete waste of time. It would be like thinking by strolling into a random office IRL and surveying people with their heads down at a random moment you will unlock some great insight.

It's cute. But it's just that. If you want to actually understand some of the things you highlight here there are far more accessible and efficient ways. Like take any data plot or visual graph.

An office is simply the wrong map. It also misses the nature of the joke in The Office. No one is really getting work done. Their work is boring and sucks, no one cares. The whole show is essentially the domino effect of Michael as a rouge agent. They have many scenes where a new character comes in and sees the whole office. It appears normal. Yet after this moment some chaos quickly begins to brew. My point is unless you are planning for a Michael to go haywire, the entire concept of an office is completely uninteresting and tedious. You may as well just use a spreadsheet.

Is it just me or do AI made websites tend to be too verbose?

Not quite verbose but they tend to repeat the same few ideas multiple times with varied wording/imagery. You keep scrolling because you think you’re gonna see something new and by the end you’ve realized you just read the same thing 4 times over.

LLMs in general have a tendency to be overly verbose, in my experience.

And yet seeing the exact same comment repeated over and over in every thread with an ai generated website is even more verbose. I find it even worse at least the website can contain new information.

They're thinking it's serious like Gas Town, that's why

Something can be ridiculous and also conceptually interesting / intelligent.

Gas Town was (transparently, directly from the author's writing) a veneer of visual/linguistic flair applied over a conceptually fascinating and well-thought-out attempt to prod gen 1 LLMs (with all their flaws) into infinite, zero-touch agentic loops.

That the author chose to do so with Mad Max-themed animals doesn't validate or invalidate the underlying concepts.

Personally, I'd rather that than some soulless OpenAI / Anthropic / Microsoft / Google / Meta corporate-scrubbed blob of beige, riskless design.

Especially when it was abundantly clear they realized the presentation choice was ridiculous, but the guts were the more important part.

And not for nothing, there's the 'We're not Kansas anymore' utility of the sufficiently bizarre, to cue people to avoid reusing the wrong prior expectations.

E.g. in Munder Difflin: 'Your LLMs are occasionally brilliant but generally stupid characters, not brilliant human analogs'

>They're thinking it's serious like Gas Town, that's why

It's not? https://munderdiffl.in/#pricing

Not even in a clever way. The bots don't actually seem to carry any personality traits; they're just ways to label <session_0001> and <session_0002>. I won't accept it as an Office parody if Dwight can work well with others.

Legally, I agree.

Morally, I think it's totally wild to care if some totally unrelated real world thing gets named after a twenty+ year old cultural icon of a TV show as an homage.

They're attempting to profit off their business. The office thing is a theme.

Discovery is part of good design. It is easy to confuse complexity with sophistication.

“send cold emails with enriched context”

What’s the difference between cold and spam?

Insightful. I think I’d do better at this orchestration at this particular stage of technology development if I named all my agents Dwight, maybe with an occasional Creed.

You are correct this is interesting but it is still quite obviously the wrong UI. For the same reason https://www.gather.town/ ends up being a waste of time.

It's cute. But it's just that. If you want to actually understand some of the things you highlight here there are far more accessible and efficient ways. Like take any data plot or visual graph.

>They're thinking it's serious like Gas Town, that's why

It's not? https://munderdiffl.in/#pricing

Something can be ridiculous and also conceptually interesting / intelligent.

That the author chose to do so with Mad Max-themed animals doesn't validate or invalidate the underlying concepts.

Personally, I'd rather that than some soulless OpenAI / Anthropic / Microsoft / Google / Meta corporate-scrubbed blob of beige, riskless design.

Especially when it was abundantly clear they realized the presentation choice was ridiculous, but the guts were the more important part.

And not for nothing, there's the 'We're not Kansas anymore' utility of the sufficiently bizarre, to cue people to avoid reusing the wrong prior expectations.

E.g. in Munder Difflin: 'Your LLMs are occasionally brilliant but generally stupid characters, not brilliant human analogs'

When you say no code leaves your machine, how does code get evaluated by your LLM of choice? Doesn't Claude see your code when you send a prompt just like it usually does?

Nailed it. I constantly get “cold emails” that were clearly written by an AI that read 2-3 pages on my web site, my LinkedIn bio, and something else on my social media. They all follow the same formula: try to break they ice with something funny about somewhere I took a photo recently, then segue into what I do for work, then offer to help me do it better - usually by offering leads or CRM improvements.

It’s such an obviously repetitive recipe that someone must have published as an example somewhere, and now lots of people (or bots) are trying to follow it, all mining for gold that doesn’t exist.

I have no desire to get either so functionally nothing.

I often get cold emails from people interested in my very specific hobby (see website in profile). These are desired and fun.

Mind, they are not written by LLMs. I would consider that spam, outside of very limited circumstances (maybe a non-english speaker using an LLM for translation).

most cold emails end up spam, only a small fraction end up being useful. My cold email strategy respects google's limits are very personal and mostly not for selling.

Why I mentioned this here: Everyone knows about cold emailing, this is one of the ways I describe the personalisation and integration. It does, slack, discord, and practically works with anything that has an api key.

It's interesting but It was hard to tell from a quick read if this was a fun game with LLMs or a productivity tool. You could stand to make that more clear.

What an exciting project, Chai. Congratulations on your work.

Does it work with local LLMs?

How is this different from a Hermes agent? Any major pro? Besides the cute graphics.

when did you launch, how many users you have, and what's the business metrics if you don't mind sharing.

I don't want to contact you for pricing.

There are folks young enough now that they've never known anything other than "the desktop" (or CLI) as a computing metaphor.

But there's no fundamental reason a metaphor has to be anything specific... it should be whatever is most widely comprehensible and efficient for the problem space.

Not feeling this. Is it necessary to call "agents" by human names? Wouldn't objectives be a safer easier to remember approach to naming? Like, say 'Clips' and 'Seeks'.

...I agree but I also kind of like it? More software should aim to be both useful and fun.

SO WEIRD.

My flagged comment has been unflagged, but the comment I made referring to the odd flagging is collapsed but not actually flagged either.

I think I must be in some kind of moderation hell.

EDIT: Oh - apparently someone at HN did it. But that's a shame, because there was good content in that thread. Why are you guys hiding it?

my last comment was flagged - presumably i didn't make it pedantic enough for someone, so let me try again:

why do you feel the need to pigeon-hole this work? the greatest things in life are more than one thing at once.

EDIT: stealth edits of your comments is naughty-naughty.

Yes, it supports opencode and qwen clis, both of them can be configured to work with local LLMs.

Let's say if you are away from your computer and your collegue asks you for a report that's anyways gonna take you one prompt on your agent.

Your Collegue's Munder Difflin agent can directly talk to your Munder Difflin agent through our network, you'd want your messages end to end encrypted.

We launched 8 days ago on product hunt, been working on it for 2 months before that.

We are piloting our TEAMS plan with 5 businesses and currently have over 10,000 end users and over 30,000 agents spawned on the community version.

About to launch our PRO tier for the power users of community version. We are optimising for everything that'll increase their productivity.

Hope it helps, also I am looking for an angel investor if anyone's interested in making this big.

Too bad, man's gotta make money to live in the capitalistic society.

You won't see big AI companies allowing other providers in their native agents/harnesses. I believe this is a great opportunity for open source projects like us.

LLMs remade Clippy. This sounds like using Microsoft Bob to manage them.

Safer? From a mental health perspective? Tbh I like human names

I didn't imply people in the past were idiots, but how on earth would anyone know what an _agent harness_ is, say?

You're addicted to being mad

don't let the crankles get you down. this thing is delightful.

Legally, I agree.

Morally, I think it's totally wild to care if some totally unrelated real world thing gets named after a twenty+ year old cultural icon of a TV show as an homage.

They're attempting to profit off their business. The office thing is a theme.

And yet seeing the exact same comment repeated over and over in every thread with an ai generated website is even more verbose. I find it even worse at least the website can contain new information.

LLMs in general have a tendency to be overly verbose, in my experience.

This is still better than what I got at some of the subreddits, I can handle it.

I can’t imagine having so little empathy that you can’t put yourself in the shoes of the creator of the IP. They didn’t even bother to tweak the characters. It’s not “inspired by” or riffing on a theme, it’s a straight ripoff being used to market some AI product. Do you think anyone who created The Office would want to be associated with AI, something that’s threatening to drive them out of a job?

What pisses me off the most is it’s just so damn lazy.

Hasn't that been true of marketing websites for a long time?

Please pardon. I have seen people complaining that copy being written with an LLM but did not see any mention of verbosity.