Manus

Description

Manus, originally launched in March 2025 and acquired by Meta in December 2025, is a hosted general AI agent: every task is given its own isolated cloud VM in which the agent reads/writes a todo.md plan, drives a browser, runs Python/JavaScript/Bash, and operates a Linux filesystem. The product pioneered the Wide Research / clone fan-out pattern, in which a main Manus instance spawns up to ~100 fully-capable sub-agents — each a general-purpose Manus, each in its own context window — to process bulk similar items in parallel. The team has publicly documented their context engineering practice — KV-cache stability, file-system-as-context, masking tool logits instead of hot-swapping tool definitions — as the operational core of the loop. The company continues to operate from Singapore after joining Meta.

Solution

Imperative ReAct-style outer loop driving a long-lived cloud VM. Each task allocated its own Manus Sandbox (fully-isolated Ubuntu VM with networking, filesystem, headless Chromium, shell). One action per iteration, executed in-sandbox, observation appended, cycle repeats. Manus typically writes and maintains a todo.md plan inside the sandbox so the current goal stays at the recent end of the context. Typical task ~50 iterations. Sandboxes persist for hours, auto-sleep when idle, auto-wake on user return. Wide Research sub-protocol spawns N parallel sub-agents, each itself a general-purpose Manus in its own context.

Primary use cases

• general-purpose autonomous knowledge work in a hosted sandbox
• Wide Research / clone fan-out tasks over hundreds of similar items
• long-horizon agent runs needing browser + code + file tools