Hacker News: asim

Show HN: Talk to Micro from Conversations: an assistant in your chat app

asim — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:14:34 +0000

Article URL: https://micro.mu/blog/post?id=1790435898213024579

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858553

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by asim in "Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free"

asim — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:47:21 +0000

Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.

Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.

Show HN: Reintroducing Micro: A Personal Assistant for Everyone

asim — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:57:51 +0000

Article URL: https://micro.mu/blog/post?id=1789656583547416701

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49741792

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by asim in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)"

asim — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:53:11 +0000

Micro - a personal AI agent - https://micro.mu

Still iterating. Started with something else, then turned that into tools, then turns that into agents, then turned that into an assistant. Now trying to make it generally useful, quite painful at times... but want something that is not Muse or ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini... and not Hermes or OpenClaw. Currently just fixing all the broken styling/css, etc, no separate frontend, single Go binary.

Self host if you like - https://github.com/micro/mu

New comment by asim in "Ask HN: Do you regret using Social Networking apps?"

asim — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:58:48 +0000

They were valuable at a certain point in time. In 2006 facebook was useful. In 2009 I found reddit useful. In 2013 I found twitter useful. And then eventually that value evaporated not only with algorithms but then the huge surge of people and what that meant for these platforms. The algorithms didn't help cut the noise in some ways it just made it work. Every platform became toxic. There is nothing wrong with social networks, but we don't need to connect EVERYONE. Smaller groups, social circles of 100 or less is ideal. Even then thats too big and is only useful where you're able to moderate it. Once things get too big it decays.

So no, don't regret it, maybe some of the twitter use. Yelling into the abyss is not healthy. But that's not to say we don't need private social networks. Not public. Private. Public social networks are going to need 10 years to reset.

New comment by asim in "OpenAI Agents API"

asim — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 06:06:12 +0000

Is GLM 5.3 Flash that good? I'm using it through atlascloud for my current project and testing performance against opus and gemini models. I think I'm mostly concerned about speed because they are mostly doing tool calls.

Also yes to an open runtime.

New comment by asim in "Ask HN: Show your micro-SaaS"

asim — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:57:58 +0000

Quite literally Micro - https://micro.mu - a personal assistant.

My goal is to consolidate a lot of daily tool use in one place, what started as individual little apps for news, mail, chat, video, etc turned into an assistant and home screen dashboard which includes its own mail server, rss aggregator, and more. The business at the model, micro transactions using topup credits, which then takes a per request credit for what you use. Eventually maybe I'd do a subscription but also a business version that allows customisation.

Feedback more than welcome!

New comment by asim in "Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent"

asim — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:12:05 +0000

This is where we're at, and all us devs are taking a crack at building our own. Then some of them take off like OpenClaw or Hermes but I don't find myself particularly drawn to those solutions. Its still very hackerish.

Also the swiss army knife approach feels wrong. Too much choice. It can connect to everything, ok great, so I could chat with it on telegram, discord, email, whatsapp, etc. For a person who comes along and wants to configure great. But for someone who just wants to use it and get a web ui and maybe some sane defaults it's a bit overwhelming. If we can go from super highly configurable does anything to sane defaults with an opinionated interface and its open source we might get somewhere. Not only that but if we can get to like Proton/Notion sort of equivalent alternatives where everything is not controlled by one player that would be good. Proton did mail. Notion did docs. Maybe someone else will do chat.

New comment by asim in "Micro – A Personal AI Assistant"

asim — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:13:05 +0000

Hello. Me again. I think for 10 plus years I've been trying to make something work. Like most of us engineers, we have a lot of ideas. And after spending a bit of time at Google in 2011-2013 I felt like I understood the direction of where things were going. Obviously technology takes time to catch up. I don't think personal assistants are the end point. To be honest, I think ambient computing and emergent behaviour is sort of a feature thing. But there are stepping stones. Personally having seen Muse and other things from large players. I feel like we have to keep attempting to build alternatives. I'm a big Google user. I'm a big Gmail user. Big, but at this point in the field of personal AI, I do think there's an opportunity to start to shift some of that dynamic. I've always built infrastructure from the ground up and so many of you will have seen me here over the years building a go framework or building a platform as a service or apis for developers. Ultimately, it was all attempting to get at some sort of end consumer and personal solution. I just felt like it would be really great if I could run the whole stack myself. But I never felt like the tools were in the place for that. Now it really feels like not only can you do it but you don't have to assemble the parts. You can literally build it all in one. So one of the things I've done is actually baked in an SMTP server and an xmpp server and some other protocols. I can also send SMS and WhatsApp to this. I can email it. I can use an IMAP inbox if I really want to. And I can backup all my storage S3.

I'm showing the front door but there's also a back door which is the apis and the MCP server.

It's all open source https://github.com/micro/mu

I've posted that here before. But you'll see from my history I think the goals keep changing or maybe not the goals but the way in which is presented. Ultimately, I think we should have an all-in-one solution that you can run yourself, but also that we have some alternative to what's out there. I think I'm a really big fan of email and smtp and the open protocol allowing you to self-host if you want. But ultimately we all went to big providers but there's potential for standalone solutions and I think the same should be the case for not just personal AI assistants but all home assistant software.

I think if you could run the full stack in the cloud or on a device in your house that would be the end game. At which point you could potentially cut the reliance on a lot of these large providers who have access to all of your data.

I'm not saying I have all the answers today but this is just one way I'm presenting it.

Micro – A Personal AI Assistant

asim — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:55:47 +0000

Article URL: https://micro.mu

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622270

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by asim in "Ask HN: 30, burnt out, with 6-10 months of runway. What would you do?"

asim — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 05:08:05 +0000

Decompress. A few days, a week. Let your brain clear. Get good sleep, go for walks, eat well and hydrate. Do little things you enjoy and take time to reflect. Try not to stare at screens too much. Look at the sky.

The answers will come. Once you've had some time to process you'll know what to do. Don't overthink it. Just take some time to relax.

I've had a few of these breaks in my life. It's time to take stock and move on. Sometimes retrain or learn something new. But ultimately breaks are good. Just don't force the change. It will come. Slow and steady wins the race.

Ask HN: Founders that raised funding and shutdown, did you raise again?

asim — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:21:49 +0000

Curious to know the number of repeat founders here who shutdown and raised again, or chose not to raise the second time. I bootstrapped, raised, shutdown, went solo again, thinking about next steps. Ultimately funding and the VC market is a tool but it comes with a lot of baggage. Thoughts?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49549602

Points: 18

# Comments: 1

Show HN: How to use Mu – Tools for Agents – with x402 payments

asim — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:28:54 +0000

Article URL: https://micro.mu/blog/post?id=1786633600633959421

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287486

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by asim in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

asim — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:40:19 +0000

Mu - Tools for Agents. An MCP server and web app that provides real time access to news, markets, weather, video, places, search, etc. It's sort of extension of a previous idea I had to put all the key tools and services behind a single api and access token. I don't know that it's quite there yet. The idea might change. Still looking for feedback.

https://micro.mu https://github.com/micro/mu

Also have an agent harness and service framework in Go

https://github.com/micro/go-micro

New comment by asim in "Show HN: Mu – Tools for Agents"

asim — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:56:30 +0000

:D you know last time I built software go-micro was 4 years slogging it out on my own. Then raised funding and had 4-5 engineers working on it. Now you can honestly go very far with Claude, copilot, codex, etc. Still the person leading needs to understand what they're doing.

Here's the last one. https://github.com/micro/go-micro

New comment by asim in "Show HN: Mu – Tools for Agents"

asim — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:24:37 +0000

Thanks for that commentary. I think it's an evolution of an idea. So way back when I was working on micro services and apis. I had this idea of putting all the common API building blocks in one place. So rather than signing up to twilio and Auth0 and Google and whatever other API providers it would just be in one place and you would get this kind of streamlined simple way of accessing it. One token you could scope it to. I put that idea on the back burner when I ran out of money.

This project didn't start as tools for agents. It started as a personal app server where I could consolidate a lot of my daily habits that were apps. I actually wrote that by hand. Then I got access to Claude and it made life easier so I was able to extend it.

But I feel like my original goal was sort of unfulfilled and that's when I realised all of this stuff could actually be useful to agents and the same idea I had about apis for developers could apply to agents. So maybe it's not going to be something everyone wants to use. But for me I'm kind of interested to build this collection of let's say a hundred of the most useful tools put them behind one mCP server with access through one token and one account and then I'm going to start to kind of program against it. And the idea is well. If you give the agent access to real world things, you could build real world agents. And maybe people are already handcrafting this but then it's not made for that audience right. So I think that's why hacker news can be somewhat subjective. I've always found it quite polarising whenever I posted anything because you know there's this half that just say well. I don't need this because I can do it myself and then there's the other half they're like. Wow, this is cool.

Anyway, I appreciate the feedback

New comment by asim in "Show HN: Mu – Tools for Agents"

asim — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:04:25 +0000

Thank you for the interest and discussion all!

New comment by asim in "Show HN: Mu – Tools for Agents"

asim — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:03:36 +0000

Thank you! The news is an RSS reader/aggregator, so picking select sources to pull from. I opted not to use anything else as this works quite well and we don't need more news than we have. Plus we have Brave for web search. The sources are like the BBC, the guardian, techcrunch, hackernews, etc.

New comment by asim in "Show HN: Mu – Tools for Agents"

asim — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:02:50 +0000

Thanks. We can do. The idea was that it as more like WeChat or Telegram mini apps. So they are things you'd build in the system that have access to the system. I'd be curious to know your use case or what you want out of it.

New comment by asim in "Show HN: Mu – Tools for Agents"

asim — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:01:40 +0000

You're right about that and I totally hate it as well. I had originally written it myself and then it got revamped along the way as I tried to change the positioning of the system from a personal home server to tools for agents.

Good observation thank you.