There’s something almost rebellious about Stumpy. In an era where every AI company seems obsessed with building the shiniest app or the most complex dashboard, this little project quietly showed up on Hacker News on February 1st and asked a refreshingly simple question: what if you could just text an AI agent?
No downloads. No onboarding flows. No fighting with OAuth permissions or figuring out why the desktop app won’t sync with your phone. Just open your messaging app, type a message, and hit send. Stumpy responds through SMS like an old friend who actually remembers your schedule, tracks your follow-ups, and doesn’t let things slip through the cracks.
The concept is disarmingly straightforward. Stumpy is a secure AI agent that lives in your text messages. You can configure it to handle different roles depending on what you need. Maybe you want an executive assistant that manages your calendar and makes sure you actually follow up with that investor you met at the conference. Perhaps you need a job hunter that keeps track of your applications and reminds you about interviews. Or maybe you just want a family assistant to remember birthdays and coordinate dinner plans. The agent adopts whatever personality and purpose you give it, all communicating through the humble text message.
What makes this fascinating isn’t just the nostalgia of texting. It’s the accessibility. Stumpy democratizes AI agents in a way that fancy apps simply cannot. You don’t need a smartphone, which might sound like a strange advantage until you remember that feature phones still dominate large parts of the world. You don’t need reliable internet, because SMS works on the most basic cellular connections. The barrier to entry isn’t just low, it’s practically underground.
The Hacker News community seemed to pick up on this immediately when Stumpy launched on Show HN. The discussion wasn’t just about the technology, it was about inclusion. Developers who rarely think about users without smartphones suddenly realized how much of the world they’ve been ignoring. The thread filled with ideas about elderly relatives who struggle with apps, rural areas with spotty data, and developing markets where SMS remains the dominant communication channel.
Security, of course, is woven into the fabric of Stumpy. In a world where we’re increasingly paranoid about what AI services do with our data, Stumpy positions itself as privacy-first. Your conversations happen over SMS, yes, but the agent itself operates under clear constraints about what it can and cannot do. You’re not feeding your life into some opaque cloud service that trains models on your personal drama. You’re texting an assistant that works for you, not for advertisers.
There’s a certain charm to the whole setup that feels increasingly rare in tech. Stumpy doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. It doesn’t promise to revolutionize your workflow or disrupt twelve industries simultaneously. It just offers a capable AI agent that you can reach with the same tool you use to order pizza. Sometimes the best technology isn’t the most advanced, it’s the most approachable. And right now, that might be exactly what the AI world needs.
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