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it worked, but was hard to tell what agents were doing, why something failed, or whether a workflow was actually progressing.
We thought it would be more interesting to treat agents as long-lived workers with state and responsibilities and explicit handoffs. Something you can actually see and reason about, instead of just tailing logs.
So we built Clawe, a small coordination layer on top of OpenClaw that lets agent workflows run, pause, retry, and hand control back to a human at specific points.
This started as an experiment in how agent systems might feel to operate, but we're starting to see real potential for it, especially for content review and maintenance workflows in marketing. Curious what abstractions make sense, what feels unnecessary, and what breaks first.
AI agents that can run tools on your machine are powerful for knowledge work, but they’re only as useful as the context they have. Rowboat is an open-source, local-first app that turns your work into a living knowledge graph (stored as plain Markdown with backlinks) and uses it to accomplish tasks on your computer.
For example, you can say "Build me a deck about our next quarter roadmap." Rowboat pulls priorities and commitments from your graph, loads a presentation skill, and exports a PDF.
Our repo is https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat, and there’s a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AWoGo-L16I
Rowboat has two parts:
(1) A living context graph: Rowboat connects to sources like Gmail and meeting notes like Granola and Fireflies, extracts decisions, commitments, deadlines, and relationships, and writes them locally as linked and editable Markdown files (Obsidian-style), organized around people, projects, and topics. As new conversations happen (including voice memos), related notes update automatically. If a deadline changes in a standup, it links back to the original commitment and updates it.
(2) A local assistant: On top of that graph, Rowboat includes an agent with local shell access and MCP support, so it can use your existing context to actually do work on your machine. It can act on demand or run scheduled background tasks. Example: “Prep me for my meeting with John and create a short voice brief.” It pulls relevant context from your graph and can generate an audio note via an MCP tool like ElevenLabs.
Why not just search transcripts? Passing gigabytes of email, docs, and calls directly to an AI agent is slow and lossy. And search only answers the questions you think to ask. A system that accumulates context over time can track decisions, commitments, and relationships across conversations, and surface patterns you didn't know to look for.
Rowboat is Apache-2.0 licensed, works with any LLM (including local ones), and stores all data locally as Markdown you can read, edit, or delete at any time.
Our previous startup was acquired by Coinbase, where part of my work involved graph neural networks. We're excited to be working with graph-based systems again. Work memory feels like the missing layer for agents.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and welcome contributions!
We previously posted about LiveDocs four years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735058). Back then, LiveDocs was a no-code analytics tool for stitching together metrics from tools like Stripe and Google Analytics. It worked for basic reporting, but over time we ran into the same ceiling our users did. Dashboards are fine until the questions get messy, and notebooks slowly turn into hard-to-maintain piles of glue.
Over the last few years, we rebuilt LiveDocs almost entirely around a different idea. Data work should behave like a living system, not a static document or a chat transcript.
Today, LiveDocs is a reactive notebook environment backed by real execution engines. Notebooks are not linear. Each cell participates in a dependency graph, so when data or logic changes, only the affected parts recompute. You can freely mix SQL, Python, charts, tables, and text in the same document and everything stays in sync. Locally we run on DuckDB and Polars, and when you connect a warehouse like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Postgres, queries are pushed down instead of copying data out. Every result is inspectable and reproducible.
On top of this environment sits an AI agent, but it is not "chat with your data." The agent works inside the notebook itself. It can plan multi-step analyses, write and debug SQL or Python, spawn specialized sub-agents for different tasks, run code in a terminal, and browse documentation or the web when it lacks context. Because it operates inside the same execution graph as humans, you can see exactly what it ran, edit it, or take over at any point.
We also support a canvas mode where the agent can build custom UI for your analysis, not just charts. This includes tables with controls, comparisons, and derived views that stay wired to the underlying data. When a notebook is not the right interface, you can publish parts of it as an interactive app. These behave more like lightweight internal tools, similar in spirit to Retool, but backed by the same analysis logic.
Everything in LiveDocs is fully real-time collaborative. Multiple people can edit the same notebook, see results update live, comment inline, and share documents or apps without exposing raw code unless they want to.
Teams use LiveDocs to investigate questions that do not fit cleanly into dashboards, build analyses that evolve over time without constant rewrites, and automate recurring questions without turning them into brittle pipelines.
Pricing is pay-as-you-go, starting at $15 per month, with a free tier so people can try it without talking to us. You'll have to sign up, as it requires us to provision a sandbox for your to run your notebook. Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/Hl12su9Jn_I
We are still learning where this breaks. Long-running agent workflows on production data surface a lot of sharp edges. We would love feedback from people who have built or lived with analytics systems, notebooks, or "chat with your data" tools and felt their limits. Happy to go deep on technical details and trade notes.