Agents Digest is a weekly recap of autonomous AI agents: the always-on, multi-bot tools that work while you sleep.
Every Monday morning I have Claude read the past week of Twitter, Hacker News, GitHub, product blogs, and Reddit, consolidate what actually matters into the digest, and publish it here. It covers the always-on agents people are actually using, in a few groups, plus whatever new contender appeared that week:
- Hosted-only agents: Grok Bot, Muse, Manus, and OpenAI's dots. The company runs the agent and processes your data.
- Hosted agents with a local option: Perplexity Computer runs in Perplexity's cloud, and its Portable Computer version runs on your own hardware and asks before sending any step to the cloud.
- Open-source agents you can run yourself: Hermes, OpenClaw, and DeepSeek. Use the maker's hosted service (Nous Portal for Hermes, DeepSeek's own site), or run them locally or on your own server.
- Agents built into developer tools: Cursor agents, Claude Code, and Codex.
The digest also compares the hosted options with free and open-source alternatives, and pays attention to who holds your data in each case.
If you are a designer, creative, or product person who keeps hearing about always-on agents and wants to know what they cost, what they can see, and whether there is a cheaper or more private way, this is for you.
What this is not
This is not general AI news. Model releases, research papers, funding rounds, and chip news are covered by my daily digest at merge.misterburton.com. Agents Digest covers one thing: tools that run autonomously, spawn multiple bots, and do work while you are away.
Why the comparison angle?
Always-on agents are new, and their plans and prices change constantly, so this digest does not try to keep a price list. It focuses on what you get for what you pay, and whether a free or open-source option can do the same job. It is written for people who are not super technical.
Whose computer is your agent on?
An always-on agent is only useful once it can see your email, calendar, files, and messages. With a hosted agent, all of that is processed on the company's servers, under their terms and their record on privacy, which is worth researching before you connect anything.
Open-source agents give you a choice. Hermes can run on Nous Portal, where Nous processes your data under its policies, or on your own computer or a small rented server. DeepSeek works the same way: its own site and API are operated from China under Chinese law, while its open models can run locally or through other providers. Roughly, from least to most private:
- A vendor's hosted service: their servers, their policies.
- Your own server plus a model provider's API: you hold your data and keys, but the model provider sees your prompts.
- Everything local: nothing leaves your machine.
Self-hosting has a cost: you become responsible for securing it, and private is not the same as safe. Connect only the accounts an agent actually needs.
If you use a model router, pick one with clear privacy terms. OpenRouter lets you turn on Zero Data Retention and switch off training endpoints in its privacy settings. TrustedRouter is an alternative built around privacy: its gateway runs in attested, confidential-computing environments, it publishes its source code and attestation evidence so you can check what is actually running, and it does not log prompts or outputs. Disclosure: I know its founder personally.
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