For the past few days have been thinking on the future of open source in the agent era - a lot of more coding agents and source code gets generated by agentic tools. Small essay on how I see open source being reimagined for the new user - agents.
I had tried manus and never could find a use-case for them that worked for me
1. Insanely overpriced versus over deep research products
2. Deep research has increasingly become a feature in most other products
3. They shot themselves in the foot by sharing very limited usage credits, in the initial wave of DR products pretty much everything was free - ChatGPT, Claude, Pplx, Deepseek. they rolled this back later and added a free credit tier but by then the hype had moved off.
TBF
1. Their post synthesis, formatting abilities were better than others
2. Their initial launch was "hypey" - lots of waitlist based access.
But I had seen somewhere they mention they had hit $100mn in revenue - M&A also signals that DR is increasingly a feature of the labs. And labs missing an assistant will probably buy a well distributed one
It was more of a timing thing, they offered 'deep research' like behaviors a long time before they were offered to standard customers of the primary ai providers.
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