General Agents vs Vertical Agents | Original
Manus is claimed to be a general AI agent tool, but it probably won’t work that well.
One reason is that it is very slow, doing a lot of unnecessary work and being inefficient. Another reason is that if it encounters a complex problem or hits a weak spot, you are likely to fail at your task.
Vertical agents work great because they are highly specialized. They are tailored for very specific tasks. There are dozens of databases and over a hundred web development frameworks like Spring. There are also numerous web frameworks, such as Vue or React.
Dify focuses on using AI to connect workflows, employing a drag-and-connect method to define AI workflows. They need to do a lot to connect information, data, and platforms.
I have built some simple agents too, such as a Python code refactoring agent, a grammar fixing agent, a bug fixing agent, and an essay merging agent.
Code is very flexible. So, Dify only covers a small portion of the space of possible ideas.
Manus performs tasks and shows users how it works by using a VNC method to display a computer.
I think the future will settle on these two approaches.
For Manus, you need to upload code or text to perform tasks, which is not convenient. With Dify, you need to build workflows using drag and drop, similar to MIT Scratch.
Why isn’t Scratch as popular as Python? Because with Python, you can do so many things, while Scratch is limited to simple programs for educational purposes.
Dify probably has similar limitations.
Manus can handle a lot of simple tasks. However, for some tasks, especially those that hit Manus’s weaknesses, it will fail.
Also, many programs or services take time to set up. In Manus’s approach, this process is slow.
As a programmer, I use AI with Python to build my vertical agents. This is the simplest approach for me. I can also set up prompts and contexts to ensure relatively stable output from LLM APIs.
Manus and Dify are also built with these LLM APIs. Their advantage is that they already have a lot of tools or code ready to use.
If I want to build a Twitter bot agent, using Dify might be more convenient than building it myself with open-source technologies.