Here is a break from whatever your day was doing! I said I'd write up a thing on Manus and show you some ways you could use it. (I'm saving OpenClaw for another day.)
What is it. Manus.ai is an agentic tool. Really it is a framework of tools, a whole nest of tools, none of which you need to know anything about, and that is kind of the point. Think of Manus as a Design Build Firm. You want a kitchen remodel, you describe it, and your DB firm will ask probing questions to better understand what you want out of it, the look, feel, function, etc. It will make some suggestions of things you could include, other functions to consider. Then it runs off and builds your project for you, presents it to you in draft form for your approval, suggests some additional tweaks, and gives you the opportunity to make edits of your own, and when you are comfortable with it, you publish it. Turnkey. It might use Claude or NanoBanana or any one of a hundred tools in GitHub that it thinks are useful. It will build it in real time, show you the code, create all the folders for the code of each component, and creates stable artifacts that are completely transparent.
That is what it is. So, how/why/what/where do we want to use / deploy this tool. I'm going to give you some examples of things I've built with it. Feel free to explore, poke around, find the flaws. I am not a coder. Most of these projects are just that, projects to understand the tool and find out where the edges are and where it can be useful. Tools like this allow for small companies with limited resources to level up fast and give big company vibes. Sure, the same opportunity for poorly designed stuff exists, just as desktop publishing produced painful design permeated with clip art, but there is for more opportunity to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
I'll go backwards in time, starting with two things I built over the weekend.
Case Study 1: Project profile.
Build Time: 20 minutes of my time. 35 minutes of Manus time
- For new projects we have traditionally sent out a letter to the neighbors "mind our dust" and put a small packet together for the client to send to their friends to show them the project. This time, I built a website about the project. The prompt took around 8 min. I uploaded assets (Construction drawings, link to our site, our logo, and three images), answered some questions about special features, and entered a couple details like the address, another 5 min or so. After the site was built I added the general construction schedule page, and made a couple of edits to text directly, fixed a logo that wasn't displaying properly, and replaced an image. Full disclosure, I did take renderings from Chief Architect over to NanoBanana to make the photorealistic images. Why? Because Manus was busy working and I wanted to fine tune the images very specifically, and that was better use of my time.
- newmodern-y98vkrqu.manus.space
Case Study 2: Construction Intelligence
Build time: 50 minutes of my time. 90 minutes of Manus time
- One of my toil tasks is going through CDs and Specifications looking to make sure everything aligns, nothing is missed, etc. I spend time counting windows to make sure there are the right number, or looking through schedules to make sure everything was captured. I wanted a tool that I could upload my CD set and Specs, have it do an analysis, and produce a report that I could give to design or production. I also wanted a tool that I could use to query about a project. Rather than dig through the documents to find the grout color in the primary shower, just ask the tool. How many windows? What is the cladding? Etc. So, I built this tool. Please play with it. It is designed to read PDF docs (but it might be able to read word docs.. haven't tried them yet). You will need to log in, which will create a silo for your project that I can't see, then upload your CDs and your Specifications, then have it run a report or ask it questions. I'm super curious to hear what you think and also what other functionality you think I should add.
- constructai-kears88n.manus.space
Case Study 3: Slideshow in a pinch
Build time: 10 minutes of my time. 1 hour of Manus time
- We participate in a trade show once a year, and this year I wanted to up our game a little with a free standing digital kiosk that folks could use to look at more of our work and sign up for a consult through our website. I bought a cool little thing called a DuraGo, which has a nice rotating matte touch screen the afternoon before the show. I was steeling myself for the toil task of going through our dropbox (don't laugh) to download images and build a slideshow when I thought, I wonder if there is a better way to do this. "Manus, can you scrape my website project galleries and build me a slideshow (vertical format)?" A few tweaks.. like asking it to make a web version of the slideshow that can run continuously, and producing a PPT and PDF version, just in case I can't get online. I pulled a few images out of the deck, and probably need to go back and remove a few more. One of the nice things about this tool is the way it preserves the code it builds as it goes, which allows you to go back and edit almost* anything on the site without it losing stability.
- oadesignslideshow-zpoijgdh.manus.space
Case Study 4: Building a better business
Build Time: 16 hours of my time. 3 hours of Manus time
- I built my company poorly at first. Then I read some books and took some classes. I gave the company a mission, a vision, a set of values and a manifesto. From there, I kept working on our systems, building SOP for the easy to manage stuff, freeing us up to have bandwidth to tackle the difficult stuff. After 28 years I started coaching a couple of companies. Through that process, as teaching and guiding is prone to do, I learned more about our systems and got better clarification. Watching one of these companies undergo an incredible transformation the importance of documenting the journey, the system, and making it visible and available for use as a teaching tool for that company as well as a maintenance tool for the employees and leadership became increasingly apparent. This process of building this site was more complicated. I spent time with GPT working on processing notes, having clarifying conversations to distill ideas and build images to support them. Then, bringing all of those assets (word docs, pdf, images) over to Manus, discussing the intent with it, figuring out what diagnostic tools could be built and what interaction could look like.
- chaordicmgmt-acdpgufy.manus.space
Case Study 5: Family Holiday Card
Build Time: 20 minutes of my time. 40 minutes of Manus time.
You know those cards that your friends and neighbors send with pics of the family doing different things over the year? Well, my bride decided that we should do one, and by we, it was implied that I, slightly hungover, would do it. Why not.
Here is the prompt: "Manus…. We're going to build a website celebrate our family's 2025 year. I'm going to upload a series of pictures. Then I'll upload a document with text about the year and some of the things we did. You will create the website, organize the images around the people in them, and create a series of slide shows. Include a lightbox type feature to let people see larger versions of selected images. All of the images must be used. The website should have a modern scrapbook feeling. Is that enough information for you to get started? Do you have any questions?"
Manus asked me for the names of the people in the photos. I gave it the names, but I did not tell it who was who or what their role was in the family. With the exception of one image, it captioned them all perfectly.
- This is the result.
- anschel25-6knxi255.manus.space
- If you want to see the workflow, check it out here.
- manus.im/JDJDHjLJEc4NNcfk2qFaQu
Case Study 6: New Product Launch
Build time: 10 minutes of my time. 20 minutes of Manus time.
- During the early days of COVID we scrambled to figure out how to survive. The team came up with the idea of building a free standing home office/studio that would not require a building permit, allowing us to move quickly as everything ground to a halt. We developed the concept, made some renderings, and then the market shifted and the project was shelved. But let's say we had pushed it forward. How would we have marketed it? It would have required setting up a meeting with our web developers, paying a few grand to produce the site, build the graphics, and more meetings. So, how could the Ai of today assist in getting a product launched in hours vs weeks?
- spacepods-gdkviitz.manus.space
Here is the initial prompt: "I want to promote this free standing building concept. It can be used for a home office, or a yoga studio or an art studio or even a small workshop. It can be a single unit or multiple units placed next to each other. It's the perfect low cost solution to adding more space to a home without digging. I need some marketing materials that utilize some of these images for social media, some printed materials, and a website that explains how it works, the different configurations and pricing. I've attached the drawings for you to use."
Case Study 7: Build a company brand
Build time: 8 hours of my time. 40 minutes of Manus time.
- Last one.. This one was for fun.. Some satire for dark times. What is the opposite of DEI? Conformity, Exclusion, Xenophobia. What if I wanted to build a company and brand identity around this concept? I would need imagery, some catchy slogans, a company handbook, maybe an evaluation tool? What the heck, why not, let's build it.
- cexsite-4djkafme.manus.space
- I'm really proud of this one, but also sad. I built the first version of this one year ago, and it was excellent. I was using a free version of the tool and it was not as powerful as it is today. I built assets in GPT and images in DALE. It had a glitch in one of the downloads, but it was built for satire and didn't need to be perfect. Fast forward to earlier this year, Manus is many versions improved, and I'm paying for more muscle. I decide to edit the site. Manus tells me that the error is not fixable and it must rebuild the site. I say sure. It rebuilds it from the ground up. It recreates the visual assets, it re-works the language, it creates a very cool, but different site. Here is the original:
- bbxpfoja.manus.space in case you want to compare.
Agentic frameworks matter. The reason Meta bought Manus, was that it does something that none of the other tools did very well; get the project across the finish line. As Manus builds, it also tests. It builds file folders to store the code for each element so that it can go back and retrieve it without re-creating it. It uses Todoist to organize it's workflow before it begins and checks off the boxes as it goes. It resists getting distracted or forgetting to complete a portion of a task. Working with a tool like this requires that you think of it as a collaborator, like a team of employees working together under one project manager. To make the work product excellent, your human brain still needs to look over the work and give specific instructions for revisions, and understand which features would be beneficial to other human users and which would be annoying or unnecessary.