We looked into the specific issue you mentioned. Collapsing replies does exist in the product, but we found it doesn't work for emails sent from Outlook (our guess on why you might have faced this). We are fixing this in the next release, shipping this week. Hope you give it a try.
Makes a ton of sense, and the framing is correct - it's easy to build for the ecosystem you live in. We plan to add M365 (Outlook) soon. And noted on "Continue with Microsoft" at sign-in.
That's fair - "your data lives on your machine as plain files" is the concrete claim, and something we should lead with. Will take a look at how Apple frames it, thanks.
Thank you! And would love to share notes. The tiny-models-only discipline is interesting; we do special handling just to keep local models from being overwhelmed, so I'd like to hear how far you've pushed it. You can find me on Discord, if you want to chat on anything.
Thanks for the concrete list! I understand where you are coming from.
Will go through these and see what we could support. If you drop your stack into a GitHub issue, that's the best place for us to work through it (and for others to +1).
Yes! You can use local models through Ollama and LM Studio. We do some special handling when you use local models, such as suppressing background agents when you chat, so the model is not overwhelmed.
Local-first for us means: your data such as emails, notes, meetings, the knowledge graph - lives on your machine as plain Markdown, readable and deletable, and the app doesn't require our servers to run. You can also go fully local for the LLM with Ollama or LM Studio. We do special handling there, like suppressing background agents during chat, so local models aren't overwhelmed. That's the core of the product.
Some third-party APIs we couldn't avoid (search has to be an API call). For TTS/STT we deliberately chose cloud quality over local support for now - if there's demand, we'll support local.
On PostHog: usage metadata only, never content. Anonymous install ID unless you sign in to Rowboat; email and plan attached after. Everything sent is cataloged in apps/x/ANALYTICS.md. We shipped v1 with no analytics and were flying little blind on whether anyone used it. If you build without the PostHog env vars, it no-ops entirely.
Yes! Under settings you can connect your WhatsApp or Telegram and chat with the assistant. It can query your knowledge and trigger coding tasks.
In addition, we have a caffeinate mode (in new release) that keeps your machine awake so the connection doesn't drop. We are also working on a mobile app.
1. True - no OS-level container today. The constraint is approval gating: consequential actions surface as a permission ask before they run (a separate supervisor LLM flags anything outside your intent).
2. True today. We'd deprioritized generic IMAP (drafts-on-thread is unreliable cross-provider), but you're the third person in this thread to raise it, so we'll scope it properly.
3/4/5. Today: Deepgram for STT, ElevenLabs for TTS, Exa for search.
At least for search we supported more providers earlier (e.g. Brave) and found the assistant's skills degrade when they can't lean on provider-specific capabilities, like Exa's granular search. So we trimmed and went deep on a few.
Feel free to raise a GitHub issue with what you want us to support and we'll do our best.
On productivity: I feel the baseline for productivity has moved up. As a personal anecdote, I had a startup before with 25+ engineers. Now we are a startup of 2 co-founders and a couple of interns, and if I step back, I feel we can produce a surprising amount of stuff. But producing is just the input side, which brings me to 'care'.
On somebody needs to care enough: I meant that AI agents by design have no intrinsic motivations, so (stating the obvious) they do not really care if the product works or actually solves the user's problem. This puts the onus on the human to care for the problem to really solve it, vs just building something. With increased AI output there are too many things to care about which the AI won't, and I believe that's why people might be working more and not less
This is a great idea. Almost like an interview mode where the assistant asks pointed questions (using your capsule spec as a guideline) and writes the answers back into the graph.
And thanks for the production context - this is not something we would have come up with. So really helpful data point.
We looked into the specific issue you mentioned. Collapsing replies does exist in the product, but we found it doesn't work for emails sent from Outlook (our guess on why you might have faced this). We are fixing this in the next release, shipping this week. Hope you give it a try.