Manus AI cleaned up my computer—for a price

With help from AI, I finally tackled some computer chores that I’ve been putting off for months. My Downloads folder is cleaner than it’s been in ages. The photos that OneDrive blandly sorted by month are now arranged into folders by event. The obscure, unpurchasable jazz album I ripped from YouTube ages ago is now properly sliced into separate tracks, tagged with metadata, and sitting inside my media server at last. Instead of spending hours on those tedious tasks myself, I delegated them to Manus, an AI assistant whose desktop app is free to download for Mac and Windows. Manus launched in March of last year with an emphasis on being able to accomplish tasks autonomously, and last week it gained the ability to work with files on your computer. (Meta acquired the startup in December, reportedly for more than $2 billion.) Alongside Claude Cowork, Perplexity’s Personal Computer, and the virally popular OpenClaw (whose creator was acqui-hired by OpenAI last month), it&#8