First Experience of Manus AI

Thanks to Manus for letting me try the private beta. Let me share my first experience of trying Manus and OpenManus here because it is not for the public at this moment.

Manus is a general AI agent that bridges minds and actions: it doesn't just think, it delivers results. Manus excels at various tasks in work and life, getting everything done while you rest.

AI Agent

I am currently researching AI Agents. In short, I can say that AI Agent is an AI or LLM (Large Language Model) that integrates with some tools. Tools can be search engines, operating systems, databases, etc. You already knew the LLM, right? Such as ChatGPT from OpenAI, the famous one, Gemini from Google, DeepSeek, they are LLMs. They are smart. Today, I can say that they are smarter than the average human. Now, imagine that smart machine has some access to some tools. That will make them not only give answers, but also give results.

To build an AI agent, I chose LangChain and CrewAI frameworks. I also tried n8n, which is easy to use, but n8n is not an actual AI agent framework. I think n8n is just like an orchestration tool.

LangChain and CrewAI are not easy to use. They require less setup and Python skills. Since they require code, they don't have a UI to interact with. So, Manus came.

Manus

I got an invitation on April 7th, 2025. I got a free 1000 credits as an early adopter and 100 more credits to rate Manus. So, I used it to create a CMS because I think the complexity of this task is intermediate-hard. Here is my only prompt.

Please create a CMS that manages Posts and Pages.

Here are the business requirements:

Here are the specifications:

The CMS should be eye-catching, easy to use, and fast or efficient.

I think Posts and Pages are common to CMS. WordPress has the same. Title and Content are mandatory. Image is optional. CRUD. It has a back-end with a database, if possible. So, I suggested SQLite.

The result is amazing. It took about 21 minutes and 526 credits. You can see the raw footage above. In just one prompt, IT WORKED!

I let Manus choose its stack. Here they are:

You can try the result by yourself. Here is the Git repository, https://github.com/aristorinjuang/manus-cms. At first, there are no tags. Maybe we need to add tags first. I haven't tried it yet.

Based on these articles, https://gist.github.com/renschni/4fbc70b31bad8dd57f3370239dccd58f and https://manusai.bot/agent, I got information that Manus uses Claude 3.5/3.7 and a fine-tuned Qwen model.

OpenManus

Don't be sad if you don't have access to Manus yet. You can try OpenManus. You can run it locally. Of course, it required Python. The recommended version is Python 3.12.

I tried OpenManus with Claude 3.7. Here is my prompt.

Please create a simple chess web-app with a beautiful UI that allows the user to play against an AI. You can use the Lichess API if possible.

I already challenged Manus (especially Claude) to create a full-stack CMS with CRUD operations. Now, I challenged her to create an interactive game of Chess, a classic game. I got a bug. Images are not showing up. So, I asked her to fix it. Here is my second prompt.

There is an error. Images are not shown. "GET /img/chesspieces/wikipedia/wN.png" Error (404): "Not found".

After that, the bug was solved. Now, the program worked. It is located in the workspace/ folder.

OpenManus knew my previous state. One of the reasons may be because of the log files from the logs/ folder. I don't know.

It cost me about 27 minutes and 510,957 (495,290 in + 15,667 out) tokens or $1.72.

The stack is:

You can try the result by yourself at https://github.com/aristorinjuang/manus-chess.

Closing

It is amazing to see AI now able to deliver results. Not just giving text, images, video, or audio output. AI is now able to code a program, to replace programmers.

Sometimes, AI delivers unexpected results that don't meet our expectations, but we can give more prompts to fix it.

You may think that my prompts are not detailed enough. That's because I wanted to let the AI be creative, and the results are amazing.

Is AI capable of changing our jobs? Especially programmers or software engineers? My answer, maybe yes, maybe no. Yes, if we have limited skills for that position. So, we need to improve more if we want to stay or change careers. No, because we can work with AI as a tool. As humans, even if we have limited skill, we can judge AI's work. We can give more prompts to it or even improve it. Because today AI still needs human intervention to grow. Instead of open books of references, we can simply ask AI.

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