Vibe Check: Duet—Anthropic's Always-on Agent

Vibe Check

Vibe Check: Duet—Anthropic’s Always-on Agent

Anthropic’s personal agent is the first one we’d call a pro tool, even with the plumbing still unfinished

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Anthropic’s always-on agent, Claude Duet, launches today in research preview. It lives in its own app, separate from Claude, and runs on Opus 5.5. Anthropic is pitching it as a chief of staff for knowledge workers.

I spent two weeks using it every day alongside Dot, the ChatGPT agent I’d come to rely on. Duet is the first personal agent I’d call a pro tool. It sends suggestions I actually want, gives recurring work its own channels, and keeps a visible list of what it’s doing and what it needs from me. It’s also unfinished. It can see the Claude sessions on my computers but can’t direct them, its email drafts are worse than Dot’s, and there’s no real voice mode yet.

My Vibe Check covers:

• Why two weeks with Duet moved me to roughly 50/50 between ChatGPT and Claude
• How our designer Tyler Nishida’s Duet checked his home solar battery before answering an air-fryer question
• Why Kieran Klaassen says “I don’t trust it yet” about Duet’s link to his machines

Paid subscribers get the full review, including the email failures we hit, my side-by-side comparison with Dot, and my call on who should switch now.

If you’re a Claude subscriber who does knowledge work, my short answer is to join the waitlist. The full review tells you what you’re signing up for.

Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and co-hosts The Every Podcast. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn.

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