13-year-old recreates Claude Cowork & Manus desktop as open source
A 13-year-old built and publicly released an open-source version of the core features found in Claude Cowork and Manus, two AI agent tools that let a computer act on your behalf. This means anyone can now access similar capabilities for free. It highlights how quickly AI tools are becoming accessible to individuals.
Claude Cowork uses Anthropic's Claude AI to watch your screen and control your mouse and keyboard to complete tasks automatically. Manus is a similar AI agent platform that automates complex, multi-step work. Both services have been either paid or invite-only, limiting who can use them.
This teenager reverse-engineered the core behavior of both tools and released the code openly on Reddit, where it quickly gained attention. The significance is not just the age of the developer — it's that a single person reproduced functionality from commercial products built by well-funded teams. Solo developers and makers can now study or use this code to build their own AI agent setups without paying for a subscription.
Key points
- Open-source code replicates key features of Claude Cowork and Manus desktop
- Paid or invite-only services now have a free, self-hostable alternative
- A 13-year-old built it solo — shows how accessible AI agent development has become
- Solo makers can use or adapt the code to build custom AI automation workflows
- Code is freely viewable, modifiable, and extensible for personal projects
Quick term guide
- open-source
- Software whose code is shared publicly so others can inspect, use, or change it.
- developers
- Developers are people who build software, apps, or websites.
- subscription
- A pricing model where you pay a fixed amount of money every month for access.
- source code
- The instructions that make a website or app work.
- self-host
- To run a website, app, or service on your own server instead of using a hosted provider.
- automation
- A way to make repeated work happen without doing every step by hand.
- workflows
- The specific order of steps taken to finish a piece of work.
- workflow
- A repeatable set of steps for getting a task done.