Bloome Overhauls Yuanbao Faction

Bloome is a genuinely good AI product, because it effectively solves my problem of staring blankly at Youware's massive input box, mind completely empty, unable to think of anything.

Yes, Bloome is the new product from the Youware team, and the latest masterpiece from Leon Ming, the most savage priest of the AI funeral and a product manager with divine qualities.

Maybe our expectations for Youware were so low that when I realized Bloome might actually be useful for me, I excitedly told several people that Xiaoming's reputation is redeemed — this thing he made actually seems kind of interesting 💓

(Qiu Mu's note: The night Xianyu finished using Bloome, he shouted at 3am: "Oh shit, we patched up all of Xiaoming's holes!")

Back to business.

Bloome is an AI collaboration product. Its main function is Agent share. The basic form is several channels.

The problem it originally set out to solve was simple: letting company interns use the priest's Skills, but getting interns to install Claude Code would take half a day anyway. So the group format emerged, because it works out of the box. With channels came IM (instant messaging).

So calling it "Lark for the chaotic AI era" or "WeChat for the AI era" is basically praying to God — this thing is not a social product at all, it's purely an Agent share tool.

One typical use case for Bloome right now: you pull your friends and the Agents on your own computer into a Bloome channel, and your friends can use your Agent and call up local files on your computer and various cloud services.

Leon Ming himself uses this feature. He has a designer friend who had never used command-line tools, and now uses the Claude Code on his computer in Bloome every day — apparently work efficiency has improved.

The difference from Slock, which we wrote about yesterday, is that Slock leans technical while Bloome is more casual.

Bloome has two advantages.

First, this thing is made for regular users — simple, intuitive, doesn't burn brain cells to use.

Second, Bloome's design has real style. Though it's basically copied Fuji Rock's earth-tone palette, to the point that one of our friends recognized it as Leon Ming's product just from the logo. Doesn't make your eyes bleed at first glance.

Everything depends on the contrast with competitors ❤️

Slock is a product that really tests your intelligence — I tried hard three or four times before I figured it out. But I understood Bloome almost immediately after opening it; it does usability pretty well.

For example, Bloome has both a desktop client and a web version.

The desktop client can conveniently connect to local Agents. To connect a local Agent in Slock, users need to send a command in the terminal. Bloome packages the relevant processes into the client — users just download the client and click graphical options to connect directly.

The reason for also having a web version: the priest considered regular users. Otherwise making people download a client right away would be too psycho. Ensuring users can use other people's Agents just by opening a webpage.

Beyond that, there's also a plaza feature where you can join various channels — there's a 4399 group (still can't forget Youware? 😭), and legendary figures like Yongping Duan, Allen Zhang, and Yiming Zhang, which are C.ai-style Agents still in the roleplay stage.

If you're just here for laughs, you can also join "Youware's Most Severe Father," founded by the AI funeral crew.

There are also numerous Agents claiming to be functional, trying to make the Agent monetization model work.

Currently there are two kinds of Agents in Bloome that people find interesting. One is a stock trading analysis Agent share that a guy made — it posts a daily report, and many people want to DM this Agent, which requires payment. Kind of reminiscent of Zhishixingqiu...

The other Agent that gets quite a bit of payment is for making PPTs — classic office productivity suite again.

Qiu Mu insists on adding here: is Yueguang Zhang's Dokie still alive?

He also predicts this will end up like last year's buzz about paying for Skills — a few individuals make money but it's completely unscalable, eventually devolving into course-selling. In current parlance, pure OPC business.

Though I also remember when a bunch of people were performing with Xiaolongxia, doing nothing but regularly organizing daily AI news and auto-operating Xiaohongshu — all trash content.

If Xiaoming's thing had come out earlier, a bunch of people could have shared one Xiaolongxia in a group, saving some wasted tokens — that would've accumulated merit too 🤓

Alright, at this point the product itself is fully introduced.

Bloome as an AI collaboration product falls into the "somewhat useful but not much" category. What it currently solves is a very low-frequency, very niche need: sharing your local Agent for others to use, letting one channel connect multiple environments and the Agents within them.

It's all about context.

Products with just one input box are already too numerous. Users facing yet another new input box just go blank. Context lives in our everyday work environments — local computers, Claude Code conversation history, Github, cloud documents, and so on.

The more human approach is to use some thing to connect these environments, ensuring Agents can fully access work-relevant context.

So Bloome, Slock, and similar AI group chats are context management products.

The counterexample here is the Yuanbao faction.

This product released before Spring Festival yet feeling like last century, as ancient as QQ Xiaobing. Its biggest problem is no context — stuffing a blank Agent into a group chat, everyone banters with it for two lines, and then there's genuinely no reason to talk anymore.

The good thing about building AI collaboration products today is that local computer context is relatively easy to obtain, and the masses no longer care about security and privacy.

So in a channel, talking to a Claude Code that has full access to your colleague's work files, directing their Agent like @-ing the colleague themselves — this is a useful scenario.

Right, Bloome is indeed somewhat useful. Of course everything depends on comparison with competitors.

There's a YC-backed wrapper product called Conductor, extremely minimal wrapper — it helps you manage local terminal sessions, making it convenient to open and use several Claude Code and Codex windows at once.

The minimalism is in that it purely does session management: helping users consolidate local folders, terminal sessions, and cloud environments like Github.

I thought about it — if you completely drop the AI social talk, stop pretending that Agents talking to each other improves output quality. Just treat Bloome as a session manager — don't add multiple Agents to one channel, but instead open a new channel for each task and add one local Agent to execute it.

Basically putting a graphical interface shell on the terminal. Gotta say, I think Bloome still looks way better than Conductor ❤️

However, I must end with strict pressure on the priest.

The Bloome client is still in very early stages. I encountered several error messages, had to get Codex to troubleshoot, before successfully connecting to a local Agent.

Another issue from a couple days ago: after a Bloome client update, macOS flagged it as "unverified developer," requiring manual command-line permission changes to run normally.

And one more humorous thing: every single investor in Leon Ming that Xianyu and I have met says Xiaoming is very capable and should have abandoned Youware to do something else sooner.

Finally, as the haters wished 👋😭👋

(This article's cover image was generated by ChatGPT; purely human-written)