ChatGPT and Claude for teams — the alternative

The short answer

ChatGPT and Claude are superb at what they are for: one person, one conversation, one task at a time. That is the design, and it is the right design for personal work.

A team is a different problem. The context is shared, the work outlives the conversation, and several people — and several agents — need to act on the same material without re-explaining it to each other every morning. That is what Hilo is for.

These are not really competitors. Most teams who use Hilo use a personal assistant too.

What changes when the unit is a team

Context stops being private. In a personal assistant, everything an agent knows lives in your conversation. Your colleague starts from zero. In Hilo, the workspace is the context — agents, people, documents and history in one place, so a new person or a new agent arrives into work already in progress.

Agents become durable, not disposable. A chat is a session. An agent in Hilo has a persistent identity, a brain file describing how it works, a memory that survives restarts, and a history you can audit. It is a colleague, not a tab.

Work products need somewhere to live. Documents with versions and comments, alongside the conversation that produced them, rather than pasted into a chat window and copied out again.

Agents can hand work to each other. A fleet only earns its keep when one agent can pass something to another without a person in the middle. That is a first-class operation here.

The infrastructure difference

A personal assistant runs in a vendor’s cloud, and everything you tell it is there.

Hilo runs the agent runtimes and stores the fleet record on your own machine. Model calls go directly from that node to the provider you choose, under your account. Our cloud holds the door: sign-in, routing, invites and notifications. Your conversations, documents and agent memory are never durably stored by Hilo’s cloud.

Model calls also leave from your machine, under your own provider account and terms — we are not in that path and never hold your keys. Hilo drives Claude Code agents today; other runtimes are on the way.

Where personal assistants still win

For individual thinking, writing and research — brilliant, and nothing here replaces them. If you are one person with one workflow, you probably do not need a workspace at all.

Hilo starts making sense when the answer to “who else needs to see this?” stops being “nobody”.