Ask HN: How to Differentiate a General Agent from Manus?
I'm building a General Purpose Agent in the B2C space. The benchmark is Manus (autonomously execute complex, multi-step tasks over time).
I'm currently stuck in a strategic loop:
1. The Clone Trap: If I just build another "Chat + Tools" interface, I have no moat. Minor UI tweaks won't save a startup against a category leader.
2. The Hammer Trap: On the other hand, trying to differentiate often feels like "holding a hammer looking for a nail." I'm terrified of building rigid workflows or "innovative" features that users didn't actually ask for, just to look different.
The Question:
For a General Agent, does differentiation strictly have to come from narrowing the domain (niche vertical)?
Or is there a real opportunity to innovate on the interaction layer (beyond the chat box) without arbitrarily constraining the user?
Forget the interaction layer. The moat isn't UI, it's Reliability Engineering.
Right now, Manus and others are great at the 'Happy Path'. But when a 3-hour multi-step task hits a 503 error on step 47, does the agent gracefully recover, retry with backoff, or ask for specific human intervention? Or does it just hallucinate a success?
If you are building a B2C agent, differentiation comes from trust. If I can trust your agent to book a flight and actually verify the confirmation email (and handle the payment failure) without me babysitting it, that's the win.
Build an agent that handles failure like a distributed system (idempotency, checkpoints, dead letter queues), not like a chatbot.