Something interesting happened this month.
March 11: Perplexity announced Personal Computer. An always-on Mac Mini running their AI agent 24/7, connected to your local files and apps. Cloud AI does the reasoning, local machine does the access.
March 16: Meta launched Manus "My Computer." Same idea. Their agent on your Mac or Windows PC. Reads, edits local files. Launches apps. Multi-step tasks. $20/month.
March 23: Anthropic shipped computer use and Dispatch for Claude. Screen control, phone-to-desktop task handoff, 50+ service connectors, scheduled tasks.
Three separate companies. Same architecture. Same two weeks.
I've been running a version of this pattern for months (custom AI agent on a Mac Mini, iMessage as the interface, background cron jobs, persistent memory across sessions). The convergence on this exact setup tells me the direction is validated.
The shared insight all three arrived at: agents need a home. Not a chat window. A machine with file access, app control, phone reachability, and background execution.
The gap that remains across all three: persistent memory. Research from January 2026 confirmed what I found building my own system. Fixed context windows limit agent coherence over time. All three products are still mostly session-based. That's the piece that turns a task executor into something that actually feels like a coworker.
We went from "will AI agents work on personal computers?" to "which one do you pick?" in about two weeks.
Full comparison with hands-on testing: https://thoughts.jock.pl/p/claude-cowork-dispatch-computer-use-honest-agent-review-2026
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