Duet is the future of chatbot interaction

Duet is an Anthropic chatbot interface praised as a more practical way to coordinate AI work than other personal-assistant tools. Its strongest advantage is responsiveness: it appears to prioritize quick replies instead of leaving users waiting while background tasks run. Its channels organize separate workstreams, can be created and managed by the assistant, and let users switch quickly between them. Channels can reference one another, helping keep tasks in the right place. Access is also scoped: users can assign particular GitHub repositories to channels, while Duet avoids requesting or storing credentials and favors existing connectors. The reviewer also values its concise replies and restrained use of message reactions, which make routine interactions less cumbersome.

The main innovation is a layered structure for agent work. A top-level view can oversee workstreams without access to their details; channels have more permissions but narrower context; and their subthreads can be further limited to specific code environments. The desktop app can access local machines when needed, such as for testing or deployment. This arrangement reflects how the reviewer already wanted to manage agents, but Duet makes it a built-in workflow and is already replacing much of their previous setup. The beta still has glitches, including invisible running threads and repository access that sometimes fails to attach. Duet may not suit everyone, and Dot remains better for voice conversation. Even so, the reviewer predicts Duet’s hierarchical approach will become standard in chatbot interfaces.