I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.”
> cynical: contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives; based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest
Cynicism is an attitude, and a choice. And comments like these are so cliche. AI is an amazing tool, and you have a volunteer helping to create the next best edition of a charity project.
LLMs have meaningfully decreased the cost of rewrites, such that many rewrites that wouldn't previously have made sense now do. They are still significantly costly and often a bad idea.
An absolute doddle assuming you have an absolutely excellent test suite. Otherwise on any nontrivial codebase you will still have regressions that make it to production and you will waste your time squashing bugs rather than writing new features.
the thing companies seem to be finding out is that quality is much more important when you're shipping 3-5x more per sprint and incident rates are multiplying at an even higher factor. allocating even less time to code review and testing is the norm, however, and it feels like the modern Agile SDLC is breaking a bit under this new mode
there's good skills to write test suites but each codebase needs its own bespoke implementation paired with so much institutional knowledge. but companies keep laying off those knowledge holders and QA to boot
it's almost like shareholders > leadership > middle managers see 'enshittification' as aspirational and are doing their best to implement a systems-level strategy in pursuit of it
that made sense when people painstakingly typed out code by hand. Nowadays the code doesn't really matter and can be trivially thrown away and regenerated as needed.
I like the idea of Monica and having a way to remember things about friends and acquaintances. I tried using Monica self-hosted for about a year and felt like the authors of Monica had totally different priorities from me. This post captures it well:
> Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently.
My opinion: this stuff doesn't matter at all and is not useful for Monica to try to capture or model.
If I meet someone at a conference or have a phone call with a long distance friend, I want to remember what we talked about. If they mention that they're planning a vacation to Thailand, the next time I talk to them, I want to say, "How was your vacation to Thailand?" I don't need software to graph all of the people in their family or to pick out "met this person at a conference" from a dropdown of 1000 options. I definitely don't need software to natively represent that two people have a half-sibling relationship as opposed to full siblings.
I switched to just plain markdown files, and I never missed the relationship modeling feature of Monica, but I would like a tool that does things plaintext can't like remind me to reach out to someone I haven't spoken to in a while or remind me to follow up with someone (e.g., they're interviewing for the next few weeks so check in next month to see how that's going).
This seems really simple to store as a graph database. If for some reason it does matter the model can just study the graph to contextualize its response? I don't get why Monica would struggle with this...
My emacs + orgmode-fu are not at that level, but I'm sure that with some thinkering one could get orgmode to trigger that sort of reminders. And it's plaintext!
After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about."
That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together.
I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE".
And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to.
Cause and effect is reversed here. The trends leading to collapse of the family , neighborhoods and friendships predate facebook by at least 40 years. Bowling Alone describes the collapse covering the 80s & 90s, and the trends were 20-30 years mature by then.
IIUC, Bowling Alone pointed the finger at TV. If you looked at time-use surveys in the 50s, versus when Putnam was writing in the late 90s, it looked like TV watching had eaten much of the time that used to be spent doing IRL social activities.
But then I also remember looking at Monica previously and deciding against it. And in reading this article, the author mentions that this will be v3 and one of the headline features will be:
> This means treating relationships as first-class concepts and letting people decide what information matters to them.
Uh? This is a CRM, even a personal one. How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?
I loved Monica for a while. Paid for subscription/hosting and all that, largely to support development.
For me the problem was the interface. Logging in to keep notes was a pain, I'm not that diligent. Instead I now can keep a local db with claude. It's sad, but this is precisely one example of software I can now do without due to LLMs.
If this matters to the devs, then MCP is a good feature to add, encpasulating all the strangeness of CRM w/ battle tested backend or something...
What I'm confused about with Monica is this being v3. Didn't Monica already get rebuilt from the original version in 2017, since there's a beta software called Chandler?
I know very little about the Monica ecosystem but how come you're throwing away a second version as well? What were the flaws in that iteration?
It's always interesting to me when I see someone build a complete personal system around functionality that to me would just be a text file, or maybe an org-mode file.
I Agree. LLMs chat assistant UI is more usable for this case. “My buddy Chris from fremont just got a promotion. Remember his new title and today’s date” is way easier than tapping a search query, filling forms, tabs and submit buttons.
For me it’s Notes.app, and I appreciate the notes being available offline and syncing across devices. Full text index is great.
I guess I’m lacking calendar invites, but I’ve been able to copy contents into AI to have it generate calendars for me.
I'm a happy self-hosted Monica user, I like that I have alerts set to remind me of birthdays and other events, and that there's a place to list, e.g. everyone who got a Christmas card from me last year. I recommend it to people.
I'm agnostic about a rewrite, I never used Chandler and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly serviceable for me the end user as it is. I rarely use the UI. I have been contemplating interacting with it more agentically, maybe having a bot update the record that I had a beer with someone instead of doing it by hand, but I like that it's focused.
I have started musing about how I might bridge it to other systems, like the people I have resolved from faces in my Immich photos, but I neither want or expect Monica to do this for me.
I'd love to hear experiences of using Monica. I've been hesitant to try it out mostly due to my own ignorance of how to get existing data in there and get it into a usable state. But I love the concept.
I enjoy using it! I don't tend to it as often as I could, and there are some ways in which the fields available on profiles/marking touch points don't exactly match my preferred mental model.
But this is one of those instances where I appreciate opinionated software reminding me to invest in what matters in relationships.
They lost me when they threw everything out and moved to Chandler. Now they're throwing everything out again. I love the idea, maybe it's time to vibecode an alternative.
I tried out Monica when it was posted to hn ages ago and still get the occasional reminder. But I've mostly switched to using the contacts app on my iphone for everything. It has primitive features that support 95% of what I need.
what is the benefit of this over a text file / apple notes? And especially now, with LLMs , a form interface (with screens, tabs, submit buttons) is even more clumsy?
Their best bet would be to train a model and provide an enhanced notepad and chat interface that extracts the relationship details directly from conversations.
I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.”
I’ve become so cynical this year.
What’s cynical about this? Everybody is modernizing their codebases for agentic development.
> I’ve become so cynical this year.
sorry don't understand the relationship here...?
> cynical: contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives; based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest
Cynicism is an attitude, and a choice. And comments like these are so cliche. AI is an amazing tool, and you have a volunteer helping to create the next best edition of a charity project.
I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Joel Spolsky wrote that about "large scale commercial applications", which Monica definitely is not.
IIRC the monica team already did this between v1 and v2, so v2 to v3 as another rewrite would be the same move.
Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.
LLMs have meaningfully decreased the cost of rewrites, such that many rewrites that wouldn't previously have made sense now do. They are still significantly costly and often a bad idea.
An absolute doddle assuming you have an absolutely excellent test suite. Otherwise on any nontrivial codebase you will still have regressions that make it to production and you will waste your time squashing bugs rather than writing new features.
the thing companies seem to be finding out is that quality is much more important when you're shipping 3-5x more per sprint and incident rates are multiplying at an even higher factor. allocating even less time to code review and testing is the norm, however, and it feels like the modern Agile SDLC is breaking a bit under this new mode
there's good skills to write test suites but each codebase needs its own bespoke implementation paired with so much institutional knowledge. but companies keep laying off those knowledge holders and QA to boot
it's almost like shareholders > leadership > middle managers see 'enshittification' as aspirational and are doing their best to implement a systems-level strategy in pursuit of it
that made sense when people painstakingly typed out code by hand. Nowadays the code doesn't really matter and can be trivially thrown away and regenerated as needed.
I like the idea of Monica and having a way to remember things about friends and acquaintances. I tried using Monica self-hosted for about a year and felt like the authors of Monica had totally different priorities from me. This post captures it well:
> Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently.
My opinion: this stuff doesn't matter at all and is not useful for Monica to try to capture or model.
If I meet someone at a conference or have a phone call with a long distance friend, I want to remember what we talked about. If they mention that they're planning a vacation to Thailand, the next time I talk to them, I want to say, "How was your vacation to Thailand?" I don't need software to graph all of the people in their family or to pick out "met this person at a conference" from a dropdown of 1000 options. I definitely don't need software to natively represent that two people have a half-sibling relationship as opposed to full siblings.
I switched to just plain markdown files, and I never missed the relationship modeling feature of Monica, but I would like a tool that does things plaintext can't like remind me to reach out to someone I haven't spoken to in a while or remind me to follow up with someone (e.g., they're interviewing for the next few weeks so check in next month to see how that's going).
This seems really simple to store as a graph database. If for some reason it does matter the model can just study the graph to contextualize its response? I don't get why Monica would struggle with this...
likewise, I keep an md for each person, along with details about birthday, names of kids/spouse, interests, hobbies, what we last talked about etc.
I really like obsidian for this, as you can model relationships (eg via tagging) if you derive value from it.
My emacs + orgmode-fu are not at that level, but I'm sure that with some thinkering one could get orgmode to trigger that sort of reminders. And it's plaintext!
After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about."
That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together.
I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE".
And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to.
/rant
Cause and effect is reversed here. The trends leading to collapse of the family , neighborhoods and friendships predate facebook by at least 40 years. Bowling Alone describes the collapse covering the 80s & 90s, and the trends were 20-30 years mature by then.
IIUC, Bowling Alone pointed the finger at TV. If you looked at time-use surveys in the 50s, versus when Putnam was writing in the late 90s, it looked like TV watching had eaten much of the time that used to be spent doing IRL social activities.
But then I also remember looking at Monica previously and deciding against it. And in reading this article, the author mentions that this will be v3 and one of the headline features will be:
> This means treating relationships as first-class concepts and letting people decide what information matters to them.
Uh? This is a CRM, even a personal one. How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?
I loved Monica for a while. Paid for subscription/hosting and all that, largely to support development.
For me the problem was the interface. Logging in to keep notes was a pain, I'm not that diligent. Instead I now can keep a local db with claude. It's sad, but this is precisely one example of software I can now do without due to LLMs.
If this matters to the devs, then MCP is a good feature to add, encpasulating all the strangeness of CRM w/ battle tested backend or something...
why aren't mentioning their failed rewrite from 3 years ago? https://www.monicahq.com/en/blog/chandler-is-in-beta/
and that Chandler is different from this Chandler? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)
What I'm confused about with Monica is this being v3. Didn't Monica already get rebuilt from the original version in 2017, since there's a beta software called Chandler?
I know very little about the Monica ecosystem but how come you're throwing away a second version as well? What were the flaws in that iteration?
It's always interesting to me when I see someone build a complete personal system around functionality that to me would just be a text file, or maybe an org-mode file.
I Agree. LLMs chat assistant UI is more usable for this case. “My buddy Chris from fremont just got a promotion. Remember his new title and today’s date” is way easier than tapping a search query, filling forms, tabs and submit buttons.
For me it’s Notes.app, and I appreciate the notes being available offline and syncing across devices. Full text index is great.
I guess I’m lacking calendar invites, but I’ve been able to copy contents into AI to have it generate calendars for me.
I'm a happy self-hosted Monica user, I like that I have alerts set to remind me of birthdays and other events, and that there's a place to list, e.g. everyone who got a Christmas card from me last year. I recommend it to people.
I'm agnostic about a rewrite, I never used Chandler and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly serviceable for me the end user as it is. I rarely use the UI. I have been contemplating interacting with it more agentically, maybe having a bot update the record that I had a beer with someone instead of doing it by hand, but I like that it's focused.
I have started musing about how I might bridge it to other systems, like the people I have resolved from faces in my Immich photos, but I neither want or expect Monica to do this for me.
How did you spin up the self-hosted instance?
Seems the self-hosting documentation is a bit... lacking. Both "self-hosting" buttons on the main page send me to "#".
It seems interesting, even though I'm more of the roll your own school of thought here because there could be some very sensitive data in this system.
https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation
Here you go: https://docs.monicahq.com/developers/setup-local-development
That's linked from their GitHub: https://github.com/monicahq/monica
PikaPods also offers Monica hosting in your own container.
The original ShowHN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295
This is also listed in TFA, fourth paragraph.
I'd love to hear experiences of using Monica. I've been hesitant to try it out mostly due to my own ignorance of how to get existing data in there and get it into a usable state. But I love the concept.
I enjoy using it! I don't tend to it as often as I could, and there are some ways in which the fields available on profiles/marking touch points don't exactly match my preferred mental model.
But this is one of those instances where I appreciate opinionated software reminding me to invest in what matters in relationships.
They lost me when they threw everything out and moved to Chandler. Now they're throwing everything out again. I love the idea, maybe it's time to vibecode an alternative.
I tried out Monica when it was posted to hn ages ago and still get the occasional reminder. But I've mostly switched to using the contacts app on my iphone for everything. It has primitive features that support 95% of what I need.
Contacts + calendar app for me, so you can keep on top of birthdays and other special occasions, know when people are away/back, etc.
A personal CRM sounds like a very interesting idea but I would feel weird building profiles on people like that.
Will they finally integrate automated recording of interactions? It’s such a pain to record everything which is why I never used it
Weren't they already rebuilding it a couple of years ago?
Am I crazy or did they do this before?
Great! Maybe this time around I’ll manage to get the email notifications going
what is the benefit of this over a text file / apple notes? And especially now, with LLMs , a form interface (with screens, tabs, submit buttons) is even more clumsy?
Their best bet would be to train a model and provide an enhanced notepad and chat interface that extracts the relationship details directly from conversations.