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Congrats on the launch. I've been fooling around with using my pipecat MCP(https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat-mcp-server) with WebRTC. The WebRTC is hooked into a Webapp interface and this allows me to "talk" to different containers(projects) on my truenas.

I have just a list of chat sessions on the web app on all my projects. The webapp is modified to launch claude code daemons (borrowed from humanlayer/codelayer) and exposes the outbound STT from the WebRTC into a chat session.

- MCP Auth is via auth0

- Webapp itself is gated by a Bearer token.

This itself gets me pretty far. I am not sure what more this is offering?

My TTS/STT models are local by Kyutai and the voice agent's LLM between STT and TTS is used to determine some basic context: e.g. what project directories, mcp servers to select and what skills to use for launching the daemons.

This sounds solid, similar stuff to what we do! Sounds like this setup gets you most of the way there. We also have a mobile app + notifications. And I haven't tried using a coding voice agent via MCP, I'll try that out soon!

Good to know its similar. Oh I actually do have a text box as well, but using it to type from the phone is not very convenient. Too much typing, I generally STT into the text box. I don't use it to code much, unless I have specced it out and I know the spec is good. But then to code it up is just a few mins, no?

I spend my time trying to tuning the voice+webapp experience: i.e. how it can explain things, can it surface thinking tokens from claude tools properly etc. The sweat, blood, voice go into `/create_research -> /create_plan` loop before the `/implement_plan`. Sometimes I copy the research and paste it into chatGPT for review or comments as well.

I generally use the MCP to get it to follow commands and explain things to me to make progress in this cycle, and I often pause it and ask for drawing me a mermaid a sequence diagram for events or a block diagram showing how pieces go together.

There's a lot of negative feedback in this thread, so let me say I'm really excited to try this! I have caring responsibilities at home that means I'm constantly switching between my laptop and phone. Claude code web has been a very useful tool for this, but it's not a great bit of software. Omnara looks much more configurable and thought out. I've looked for various solutions to this problem that just work, and nothing else mentioned in this thread fits the bill. Your demo looks like it nails it - I'm excited to try!

Thank you! Yeah, a big selling point of Omnara is that it "just works." Let me know how it goes!

First impressions are good! Couple of small bits of feedback:

- I only had the option to create a worktree from main. I'd like to be able to pick any starting branch. Not a big deal, I just told claude to checkout the branch I wanted as my first instruction.

- For some reason in the Android app the usual automatic capitalisation of the first letter in a sentence doesn't work. Claude probably doesn't care, but I like to type in proper sentences!

- It would be nice if the worktree names got semantic names, e.g. by running my first prompt through Haiku. Maybe that's not the order things are set up in though

> branching not from main

This is actually a PR that I have open right now, it'll be out soon!

> automatic capitalization

We'll get this fixed

> automatic worktree names

definitely on our roadmap, probably will do that this week

Why don’t use Happy Code? It’s open source and free to use: https://github.com/slopus/happy

We've seen a decent amount of comparisons to Happy, but anecdotally from some Omnara users who have used both, I've heard that reliability and latency when sending messaages is much better in Omnara

We try to provide more features on top as well, including (but not limited to):

* improved web interface

* worktrees

* sandboxing

* richer git management (richer diffs, checkpoints, git operations)

* preview URLs

Stability was our (Happy) temporary problem, since our DB grown to reach like a TB now, but since we upgraded it is much much better.

Haha yeah, we love happy, seems like you guys are popular in this thread :)

A good reason for not using Happy Code is that they collect your usage data in the iOS app. Not sure what Omnara does, but vibe coded clones don't sell out your data to some random startup wrapping Anthropic tools.

Good question. Since this is open source why bother with Omnara in the first place? Or perhaps this is a fork of Happy Code and now it is a YC startup.

Just shows that AI has advanced so quickly that it is easy to clone YC startups to zero.

We're not a fork, and from what I've heard from users our architecture is more reliable

Feels expensive for something that an engineer can hack in a couple of ours with tailscale and Claude Code. Has potential though. At $9 I'd be totally in, but moving from CC's Max plan at $100, adding $20 makes me wanna just hack an alternative. Maybe I'm just cheap.

Funny how similar this is to the famous comment on Dropbox's Launch HN post in 2007.

"1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

You couldn't vibe-code Dropbox in an hour though...

You wouldn’t vibe-code a car...

Why is it funny? Is Dropbox supposed to be some kind of success? Their stock is down -16.72% from IPO seven years ago.

Yeah, it's only at a 6.355B market cap, complete failure!

Drop Box is free though.

they're free up to a limit, just like us!

Yeah that makes sense. I personally feel like the tailscale + terminal emulator solution is pretty limited compared to Omnara's interface, and there's also 0 hassle of maintaining anything on your own with Omnara. You can try out Omnara for free, and see if you like it before paying! 10 sessions can get you pretty far, and there's no limit on the session length.

Agreed. In a post-CC world anyone can build this for themselves so easily. Especially since their entire supposed customer base already uses these tools to begin with.

True, certainly something you could do with Tailscale+tmux but if this makes that a lot easier then it could end up being popular, increasingly the people who are pushing the most money into the likes of Anthropic are not rhe people focusing too much on the amount of money being put towards achieving their goal, rather the progress(tbh more realistic to say perceived progress) towards that goal in the shortest amount of time.

Obligatory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

You are cheap! So am I! We're developers. Just ask Claude to use the Claude chrome extension MCP and have it setup Tailscale for you. Not to be rude, but we as developers have to learn not to smell our own farts and think they're gold. I had Claude shit out a shell script that's useful for me, and for people like me, but holy hell, that does not a startup charging $20/month make.

Welcome to the new economy.

I don't quite see the appeal, because Claude Code already supports something similar. They spin up container to make the changes in and then open a PR. I can just use the Claude iOS app to do this. My computer doesn't need to be running or exposed to the internet.

Omnara’s is useful if you have a complex dev setup that’s hard to replicate in Claude’s remote container, or you want to test things out locally without any friction. Omnara tries to make switching between being on your computer and being on your phone feel seamless, whereas in Claude, local and remote dev feel more disconnected.

I can't sit back down at my computer and cd/ssh/tmux into that same environment.

Great to see. It’ll be great to democratize access to remotely using cli coding agents.

I’ve been iterating the past few months on a solution to use Claude Code on my phone while it runs on my laptop and it’s a lot of moving parts: Tailscale, git worktrees, tmux, an always-on “caffeinate” process, and a ton of hooks & tweaks to fix bugs along the way. It’s become very comfortable but in the process, impossible for anyone but me to understand.

But it’s awesome because I own the machine that runs tests and am not paying monthly for anything but Claude Max - and it keeps going if I lock my phone or go into a cell reception dead zone.

Productising such a thing would be a very interesting challenge indeed.

Woah, I had this exact idea, down to the tunneling and local machine! I basically just coded up a Tailscale + caffeinate harness for my agents and it's been working super well. Your UI looks great though, glad to see more players in this space!

Also your promo video is really fun! https://www.omnara.com/assets/landing/video/movie.mp4

Haha thanks! It was fun to shoot :)

I’ve been SSHing into my dev server off of my phone to run Claude Code while commuting, so this is a product that I would love to switch to. I can’t use the Claude iOS app due to the testing set up I have. That said I do have a couple of questions:

- Is it possible to completely disable or not use the remote sandbox features? I would never use them and would prefer my code stays on my device.

- For those of us that are using subscriptions, does it show our remaining usage? I would hate to run out of tokens in the middle of a session.

- One feature of the CC TUI I sorely missed on mobile is the ability to look up and directly reference files via “@“. Is any functionality like this planned?

- (This likely won’t affect my decision to use the service as I’ll just put it on a company card.) $20 per month for a service that runs CC on a remote machine in a convenient matter is steep but doable. Asking that same amount for a running code on my own server seems a bit unjustified, especially since this is pricier than the cost of a Claude pro subscription. Are there any plans to offer a cheaper tier for those of us that just want to run this on our own machines?

Awesome, that's the exact reason we built this!

Is it possible to completely disable or not use the remote sandbox features? I would never use them and would prefer my code stays on my device.

Yes, the remote sandbox feature is disabled by default, and you have to manually enable it for the syncing to start.

For those of us that are using subscriptions, does it show our remaining usage? I would hate to run out of tokens in the middle of a session.

Currently Omnara doesn't show your usage limits, you would have to check that at claude.ai. I'll look into add that though.

One feature of the CC TUI I sorely missed on mobile is the ability to look up and directly reference files via “@“. Is any functionality like this planned?

Yes, this exists in Omnara already!

Are there any plans to offer a cheaper tier for those of us that just want to run this on our own machines?

That's a good idea, we'll think about doing this where we don't offer sandbox + voice, and just have the messaging service.

This project seems like a good idea that didn't have enough of a moat. I'd suggest trying to narrow your target customer from "engineers that want to manage agents on their phone" to "people trying to do some particular kind of task," so you can bake in more value add and automation. You're not going to beat the labs on general tools, but they're not going to be willing to narrow their target customer, so you'll always be able to win at the margins.

this is the right framing imo. the actual job to be done isn't "manage agents from my phone," it's more like "don't lose 20 minutes of context because i had to step away from my desk."

i'm a solo dev and i use claude code constantly. the phone use case for me isn't about writing code on a small screen, it's about being able to check if the agent finished, approve a diff, or nudge it in a different direction while i'm away from my laptop. the tailscale+tmux crowd is right that you can hack this together, but the real question is whether the UX is good enough that you actually use it vs just waiting until you're back.

the moat isn't the tunnel, it's the workflow. if they nail the right notifications and approval flows for specific tasks ("your PR is ready, here's the diff summary"), that's way more defensible than a generic mobile terminal.

Our goal is building infrastructure around the agent tools, which I think is how we'll build up a moat and provide automation value. I agree that competing with the labs on general tools is probably a bad business decision, but I'd argue that just means we should compete on the infrastructure, not the harness/model.

If you can see the messages unfortunately thats a deal breaker for me. If its encrypted end-to-end than I’m in.

Fair concern. We don't have true E2EE yet because our service needs access to message content for cross-device sync, notifications, and agent execution. Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest, and all repo operations happen locally on your machine.

We've heard this from other users and it's on our roadmap. The challenge is we're building features like voice coding agents and hosted sandboxes that require plaintext inputs, so we'd need two execution models. Doable, but adds complexity for our team size.

That said, it's something we're prioritizing as we grow. No promises on timing, but it's coming.

If you want to discuss specific requirements or a local-only mode, happy to chat: https://discord.gg/Dc46sYk6e3

> We don't have true E2EE yet because our service needs access to message content

That means you don't have E2EE, period. Implying that there is such a thing as "true E2EE" (as opposed to "E2EE") either indicates that you don't know what E2EE means, or that you're scammily trying to do what Apple does with iMessage and say that something that isn't E2EE is, for marketing purposes.

E2EE means that nobody except the endpoints has keys. There is no such thing as "true E2EE" any more than there is such a thing as "true pregnancy".

https://happy.engineering/ says that they have E2E encryption. Is that true?

Yes, they have E2EE, but it comes with some limitations in the features they're able to provide.

Like what? I like it a lot...

Replying to your latest comment here:

What do you mean by syncing? Happy coder syncs sessions between all my happy coder clients. I can even see in real time how happy coder in my browser's conversations progress as well as on my phone, in parallel.

Omnara also displays realtime conversations between all Omnara clients. What I mean by syncing is syncing your conversation and code changes to a cloud sandbox, which is useful if you're using Omnara on your laptop and you close your computer (as explained in the original post). If you run your agents on a persistent cloud VM, then this is less of a value add.

I can voice chat with Happy coder.

We use https://docs.livekit.io/agents/ which runs the voice agent in the cloud (to enable the above use case, and a better experience when you're using your phone when it's off), whereas I believe happy runs a client-side voice agent.

Thanks for answering my questions! I see that Happy Coder is not far from Omnara. I hope Omnara can be not too far from E2E encryption. The lack of E2E encryption was why I didn't chose Omnara.

Two of the main feature's we're investing heavily into are remote sandboxes + syncing, and voice agent support, wouldn't work with E2EE.

I can voice chat with Happy coder. Also, I run happy coder in a sandbox of mine on my computer. What do you mean by syncing? Happy coder syncs sessions between all my happy coder clients. I can even see in real time how happy coder in my browser's conversations progress as well as on my phone, in parallel.

What changed from your original launch? I know you were hamstrung by something (updates if I recall).

Was there some unlock that happened to make it viable again?

I was an omnara user until that happened and then I switched to happy.engineering. It’s been okay, but I’m excited that omnara is back

Haha glad to hear that you used Omnara before. In the old version, we were directly parsing the terminal output, which was really hard to maintain. But that meant you could use the Claude Code CLI directly in your terminal, and have the same session appear in your phone.

Now we use the Claude Agent SDK (basically a headless version of Claude Code), and we make our own UI for laptop and mobile. This is way easier to maintain than the previous solution we had. You can import Claude Code CLI sessions into Omnara, but you cant see a 1:1 realtime Claude Code CLI session in Omnara anymore. But we think that a GUI is a better experience than the CLI anyways for managing a bunch of agents.

I really miss the old way of doing things. I know it was a maintenance nightmare, but I only really value having an iphone app with native notifications that lets me see exactly the same stuff I would see on my laptop. I don't manage a ton of agents, I typically have one main task I am focusing on and possibly another smaller task on the back burner.

I think the native Claude and Codex apps already do this for free. They even have the voice input.

They currently don't have the ability to use a local session from your phone, and they only have voice input, not voice input and output for completely hands free usage.

> They currently don't have the ability to use a local session from your phone…

Claude Code will help you set this up using tmux. Voice input and output personally seems like a gimmick, but OS accessibilty features should work fine for this.

Voice input + output sounds gimmicky (as I admit in the post), but it's quite useful for mobile coding. It's not as trivial as just printing out whatever Claude Code outputs.

"Claude Code will help you set this up using tmux" - I don't think that you can connect to tmux sessions running in Claude Code/Codex remote VMs using their mobile apps. Their mobile apps don't provide a terminal emulator afaik

> Their mobile apps don't provide a terminal emulator afaik

Right, this requires using a terminal app.

> Voice input and output personally seems like a gimmick

Nice to have when cooking and I want to use my laptop without wiping my hands dry constantly.

How does this compare to Happy Coder? https://github.com/slopus/happy

Anecdotally from some Omnara users who have used both, I've heard that reliability and latency when sending messaages is better in Omnara

We try to provide a decent chunk of features on top as well, including (but not limited to):

* web support

* worktrees

* sandboxing

* richer git management (richer diffs, checkpoints, git operations)

* preview URLs

I met Ishaan a few months ago when he had just gotten into YC, congrats on the launch!! Progress seems great and excited to see what you have in the future!

Really appreciate that means a lot. Excited for what’s ahead

Pretty cool was just thinking about this yesterday if I could Claude code from my phone on the couch on side projects would be awesome

I have been hungry to do more work from my cell phone. It's ridiculous to be forced to sit in front of a computer to work with AI.

My current solution is to have claude (--dangerously-skip-permissions) listen for messages in my slack DMs to myself and take action in response to those messages.

I would happily switch to something better.

Why is Omnara better?

There's a lot of solutions that people are hacking together to be able to use coding agents from their phone (e.g. terminal emulator + tailscale, slack, whatsapp, telegram). I enjoy Omnara more than those solutions because it's a native experience tailored for coding agents, e.g. you can select models/harnesses, spin up new sessions, create worktrees, view code changes, see tool calls, have live previews, have voice agent support, and on and on. Omnara is a solution meant to interact with coding agents from your phone, so we're able to add a lot of nice UX features to our app that those other solutions can't.

Been looking for something like this - I feel like I lose a lot of work during lunch runs and on the commute home.

I already have my OpenClaw instance set up with a user account and associated API key on my Gitea instance, and all I have to do is instruct it in Mattermost and it has PRs up and ready for me, with links. I review them, tell it to merge them, and my CI autodeploys it, all in Mattermost and Safari on my phone.

For sensitive apps, it can't merge them, so I have to hit the button in the Gitea web interface (also on my phone), which does the same thing.

OpenCode is free and has an excellent front end for this kind of work

OpenCode is great and `opencode serve` in particular is very cool. Though I think the main thing is that you need to manage the OpenCode server yourself and expose it via tailscale or something like that. Our goal is to provide managed infrastructure around the coding agent harness with features like mobile, sandboxes, preview urls, etc.

Our goal is to be harness agnostic as well, so eventually we will be adding support for running OpenCode sessions in Omnara.

How do you plan to be harness agnostic if you design requires using the agent SDKs (Claude Agent SDK, etc.)?

I think someone should also mention Happy (https://happy.engineering), which has decent mobile clients and is currently MIT-licensed.

Although I must say that Omnara's UI looks absolutely fantastic. Well done!

Thanks for the shout! Happy looks solid - always great to see more options here. Anecdotally from users who've tried both, we've heard Omnara has better reliability and latency. We also layer on some features like web support, worktrees, sandboxing, richer git management (diffs, checkpoints), and preview URLs. Would love to hear what you think if you give it a spin :)

I use this everyday, and even have the Happy server on my home Mac to skip the cloud relay.

I think I will only explore an alternative if the UI on the mobile is dramatically better (something to explore) but im trying my best to only pay for the model these day and avoid any other tooling subscription, and doing pretty great thus far.

Totally get it, we're trying to minimize subscriptions too. Free tier gives you 10 sessions/month with no length limits, so you can actually get a decent amount done before deciding if it's worth paying

Just watched your walkthrough video and have to say kudos, that looks like a really tight release. will give it proper test drive.

cheers and congrats on the launch!

How is this different from VibeTunnel which is not limited to just Claude and Codex, but brings your terminals with you on your phone using tailscale?

There's also Happy, Coder/Mux, and so many others that actually started out open-source and stayed that way and I can be sure my chats are not going to a 3rd party?

We think that terminal interfaces, especially on mobile, are not going to be the way people end up interacting with agents in the long run, which is a big reason we built Omnara.

And Omnara chats are stored in our DB, which is how we're able to enable our voice agent, cloud syncing, and ability to see all your chats while your machine is offline. Basically anything you see in the web and mobile clients is being proxied/persisted through our server, until you delete the chat.

Good point, but Happy also has parsers to turn terminal output into "chat bubbles" but with how often Claude Code and Codex change that output, that parser has to be updated every time. With new terminal agents coming into the fray, wouldn't you forever have to parse new agents to make them available?

We use the Claude Agent SDK and the Codex App server, which makes it easier to maintain (we used to parse out the literal terminal when we first launched, which was not maintainable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878650). There's also ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/introduction) which we'll probably integrate eventually, which should make it easier to manage all the harnesses.

Congrats the launch, guys!

Thanks!

Can you guys please make an iOS app that replicates the Claude code app to hook into this one problem my hat is that it can’t query live DB etc. all the things we need a persistent client based terminal session for. But the app is really slick, so it would be great to have it with the multiple threads sidebar, etc..

You should be able to use Omnara for that use case, unless I'm misunderstanding something

I see the need and I'll probably give it a go, but how does Omnara handle users' data? Do you store my tokens, stuff about my project, etc.?

If I paste in something confidential, and Omnara suffers a breach tomorrow - will my conversation data be a part of it?

Good question. We don't have E2EE yet (it's on the roadmap), so some level of trust in Omnara is required today. All repo operations happen locally on your machine. For messages/chat history: we store those encrypted at rest because we need access to sync across devices, send notifications, and resume agents. Cloud sandboxing is opt-in and would require syncing codebase state.

Built something like this that’s open source and free: https://github.com/saadnvd1/agent-os

How does it compare to https://hapi.run/ ?

I have been pretty satisfied with it, and it’s free with unlimited sessions, so I need a good reason to switch

I haven't tried out https://hapi.run/, but I've tried similar things and in my experience Omnara is much more reliable than the other solutions, as well as I enjoy the UX of Omnara much more. Give it a try, it's one command to set up and the free tier gives you everything that the paid tier does, so you can decide if you like it before paying!

when you say reliable what do you mean? hapi never once failed for me, it’s self hosted + tailscale so pretty robust

reliability is not big selling point given the high cost on unlimited sessions which I use quite a bunch

I mean messages drop or stall, or syncing doesn't work, or I can't get through setup at all. But I'm sure all these solutions have improved greatly since I've tried them, I tried these things much earlier on. If hapi works perfectly for you, then maybe Omnara wouldn't be much of a value add. Are there any pain points you face with hapi?

Yeah none of these issues happen to me, so if Omnara has no other value add then I don't see a reason to pay for it.

I was curious if it had something Hapi didn't have, but sounds like it doesn't.

Thanks for your help!

Can you make it work in android auto?

We have voice support for this exact reason! Not sure if I'd want to enable people vibe coding from their car dashboard xD

There's certainly something to the "mass delegation" trend. My best rn is on email: https://ai-chat.email

Yeah we've definitely taken some inspiration from everyone who building an agent orchestrator/delegation app right now!

Open Source alternative: https://github.com/inercia/mitto

getting this error trying to connect github: github_unauthorized: GitHub OAuth error: The redirect_uri MUST match the registered callback URL for this application.

Looking into this, will fix this soon! GitHub auth should be working on the web app, if you try there (assuming you got this error on mobile). You can continue to use Omnara normally without signing into GitHub, you just won't be able to use the cloud syncning feature til you auth with GitHub.

just use spoq.dev

https://x.com/OafTobarkk/status/2021634083449975125

i don't get all the hate in this thread. I literally was about to build this today, using my home server, tailscale, and some kind of web frontend. thanks for saving me time :)

Thanks, we try to make it much easier than self hosting and managing your own tunnels! Let us know how it goes.

Correct me if I'm wrong but they seem to proxy all your conversations.

"You're walking in the park when an idea for a new feature hits just..." stop thinking about this shit and focus on the walk in the fucking park. Jesus.

how is this a company?

Another option that does all this and more for open code: https://github.com/btriapitsyn/openchamber

Not affiliated with that project, but have been using it for a few weeks and it blows every other 'GUI for the CLI agents' I've tried out of the water in terms of both features and just working snappily/consistently.

Also totally free, and actively being improved by the solo maintainer and an active community of contributors.

Omnara providing a tunnel for you is nice, but considering Tailscale is dead simple and free, feels hard to justify $20 a month for what looks like considerably less features than openchamber

Yeah, this looks great for OpenCode (which we're planning on adding soon!), but I personally have Claude Code and Codex subscriptions, which Omnara supports. We also support syncing your local session to a cloud sandbox to continue your session, and in the cloud sandbox, we provide LLM tokens. As well as our voice agent costs are covered by us.

thanks I missed "support syncing your local session to a cloud sandbox to continue your session" when reading through your docs that's a really nice best of both worlds feature!

FYI openchamber/opencode support claude/codex/copilot subscriptions as well

great product.

try spoq.dev , it's free

OpenChamber is a good option you use opencode

FWIW, we'll definitely add OpenCode support soon!

Its hilarious how there's 50 clones of the same thing in the comment section, yall need to go watch Peter Thiels talk at YC from 2011 or whenever. Be contrarian, stop building the obvious thing.

When we started out, people were asking "Why would you want to continue coding on your phone". There's obviously a ton of competition now, but I think it's also validation for us.

Even though this might be "the obvious thing", I think there is a non-obvious way to build it.

I would be blown away if Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google don't all offer this functionality in the near future.

Also, I'm not sure many engineers really WANT to be able to do more "vibe coding" away from their laptop.

Is this really what our job is going to be? Typing in prompts from a mobile phone?

Good luck guys but I think a pivot might be in order.

I don't really understand the market for handoff of your vibe-coding session. Considering there's a need, does this use-case warrant a full blown SaaS solution?

Sidenote - is this novel enough to be backed by YC? Just seems like a feature that Anthropic/OpenAI could release any day.

The idea is that if agents are coding for you, there's no need to be at your desk to manage them. I think the case for managing coding agents without being at your desk is becoming stronger as agents become more autonomous.

And for your sidenote, we'll see when Anthropic/OpenAI release something similar. For now it's pretty useful, and we're making it better every day.

congrats on the launch man! didn't mean to come off negatively. as for the sidenote - it might be worth considering now to push the product forward.

Thanks! And yeah it's definitely something we think about very often, we're coming up with ways to differentiate ourselves.

So you're just a Claude Code wrapper? Question to YC: how did this get funded?

We're a very complex Claude Code wrapper :) Try it out and lmk what you think!

I like your landing page and the video where the guy does stuff outside while his agents work in background, but the nature of your company does not appear to me as being consistent with screenshots of messages from Paul Graham discussing what startups ought to be like, etc, that YCombinator's LinkedIn account keeps posting. I'm not saying that this is you, but I have an impression that a lot of these companies getting into YC do it as a money grab and/or for bragging rights while being as technically sophisticated as an above-average high school project. It's great that you got funded, but I'm not sure if you should have been.

I'd say to try it out first, and then let me know what you think! And a product doesn't have to be technically sophisticated to be funded by YC (although I would say that Omnara is a pretty technical product, which you'll see if you try it out)!

I used to think that getting admitted to YC was a major accomplishment. Maybe it was at some point, but at the college graduation parties of my daughter it seemed like pretty much everyone who tried had gotten in. Most collapsed after a few months due to infighting, funds mismanagement etc. It was fascinating to watch.

I think you mean "prestigious" rather than "major accomplishment". You're right, there was a small period of time when it was. However, that window didn't quite align with "best time to do YC" (several years prior to such prestige) nor with "best time to be doing YC" (the prestige embellishes your resume, which is useless if you're otherwise occupied).

It's interesting to me that YC has managed to dilute this prestige to a large extent. I don't think it's an inevitable result of scale: look at Google. I think "Xoogler" prestige has diminished, but it's not nearly as bad as what has happened to the YC label.

My theory is: YC never figured out their formula. The whole formula is essentially Paul Graham, who had a knack for trusting his gut (and sometimes his wife) when everything else in his "system" was saying NO.

Once they lost that, they had to rely on what was left, and it simply wasn't competitive anymore. It's like Apple in their John Sculley era. While Sculley is credited with growing Apple's revenue from $800 million to $8 billion, his approach created a "mess of dull SKUs" that eventually confused customers and diluted the brand.

They also have a (bad) habit of removing access to bookface for all the founders who aren't "active", decimating their network and in some ways discarding valuable knowledge around what didn't work.

I think Jessica Livingston deserves at least as much credit as Paul for YC's success in that early era, and IIRC he has the same view.

sounds really close to fart, in japanese.

Omnara is used while on the toilet a lot

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OpenClaw already does all these things and better. It can run 24/7 in one (or more) VMs that I control from my phone, without extra cost.