Look, I really didn’t want to like Duet. I don’t want to be an Anthropic fanboy and it annoys me when they do things better than the competition. But they have done it again.
I have given serious effort to Muse, Dot, NanoClaw, and a host of other personal-assistant-type harnesses. Duet is the first one that felt more useful than tedious, and it feels like a serious evolution of the chat experience rather than another “give me all your credentials to be useful” agent. Here’s why I like it so far.
Other assistant apps are always doing who-the-hell-knows-what in the background while I wait for a response. Duet clearly prioritizes getting a snappy response to the user even if background work is needed. It’s supposedly powered by Opus 5.5, but I’ve never seen Opus move this fast in other Claude UIs. Clearly some tuning went on here. This is critical to be a useful assistant: If you want to be my shell to the world, I am not going to sit and twiddle my thumbs between commands.
