Hey HN - I shared my project <i>nova</i> at the start of the year and got some great feedback and thought some of you might like an update.<p>Short version : a big piece of feedback was that it was hard to use, so I’ve completed a massive usability and onboarding pass, culminating in this overview video capturing the workflows and features available and I’d love for you to check it out : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq8lVwYMdJM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq8lVwYMdJM</a><p>Long version : my initial share was an early prototype of nova, a customisable ai assistant, you can see the thread here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36651557">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36651557</a><p>Since then<p>- got some great feedback and burst of users - and everything held together!<p>- got structured json responses running internal commands, start of independent ‘agents’<p>- created ‘loadouts’ which are sets of cartridges as agents with their own workspaces<p>I have been able to use it for work and side projects and an interface for configuring agents has come in really handy. I have felt a bit discouraged as similar work came out, but wanted to do my idea justice, so have kept at it.<p>Recent progress<p>- added past conversation retrieval and recall grouped by loadout<p>- switched over to open AI function calling and improved the async workflows<p>- added web search, image generation, video editing, and better note handling<p>- plus lots of refactoring, bug squashing and trying new stuff like voice<p>Some numbers<p>- got up to $500 + spent on credits with openAI per month (whoops)<p>- accidentally spent about $4k one month, (don’t tell my wife)<p>- lots just using guest nova profile, including lots of people in china (你好，中国朋友们!)<p>- had a few hundred different unique sign ups, and a few regular users<p>- I’ve typed something like a million characters personally, I use it every day<p>Current stack<p>- still react frond end, pythong back end, quart + prisma -> planet scale, big area for optimisation there, plus some db handling I’d like to tidy up<p>- I am starting to do more compute heavy stuff, eg video editing, and looking at breaking those up into discrete services, probably migrating to AWS (from railway), so I can pass jobs to the right hardware<p>Where to next<p>So I basically committed myself to finalising what I’d call ‘my current sprint’ - bug free, better onboarding and usability, solid deployment to clients. I’m declaring sprint complete as of this post (about three months behind schedule).<p>However I’m still pretty obsessed, my next set of goals are:<p>- much better knowledge management and retrieval : go from a patchwork of file handling and retrieval to a unified system and interpreter<p>- expose agents to each other so they can both query and retrieve based on other agents threads, but also action and make requests.<p>- let users add their own API key, expose nova api to more clients and add other models and ideally do desktop version<p>One thing I’ve considered is open sourcing at least a version of the client and server as packages. I haven’t done anything open source, but could see it as an interesting challenge.<p>Anyway, I hope you get a chance to try out the updates, you can test them out at <a href="https://asknova.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://asknova.ai/</a><p>I’d love to hear about your onboarding experience, especially if you feel a sense of continuity from the guest to logged in use. If you have ideas on how to utilise it or feature requests I'd love to hear from you.<p>If you have any feedback, or want to chat, hit me @samueltates on twitter or me@samueltate.com<p>thanks HN and have a great year!