AI Horseless Carriages

One of the interesting things I've noticed is that the best experiences I've had with AI are with simple applications that don't do much to get in the way of the model, e.g. chatgpt and cursor/windsurf.

I'm hopeful that as devs figure out how to build better apps with AI we'll have have more and more "cursor moments" in other areas in our lives

I enjoy Claude as a general purpose "let's talk about this niche thing" chat bot, or for general ideation. Extracting structured data from videos (via Gemini) is quite useful as well, though to be fair it's not a super frequent use case for me.

That said, coding and engineering is by far the most common usecase I have for gen AI.

> This demo uses AI to read emails instead of write them

LLMs are so good at summarizing that I should basically only ever read one email—from the AI:

You received 2 emails today that need your direct reply from X and Y. 1 is still outstanding from two days ago, _would you like to send an acknowledgment_? You received 6 emails from newsletters you didn’t sign up for but were enrolled after you bought something _do you want to unsubscribe from all of them_ (_make this a permanent rule_).

I think the other application besides code copiloting that is already extremely useful is RAG-based information discovery a la Notion AI. This is already a giant improvement over "search google docs, and slack, and confluence, and jira, and ...".

Just integrated search over all the various systems at a company was an improvement that did not require LLMs, but I also really like the back and forth chat interface for this.

I wonder sometime if this is why there is such an enthusiasm gap over AI between tech people and the general public. It's not just that your average person can't program; it's that they don't even conceptually understand why programming could unlock.

I like perplexity when I need a quick overview of a topic with references to relevant published studies. I often use it when researching what the current research says on parenting questions or education. It's not perfect but because the answers link to the relevant studies it's a good way to get a quick overview of research on a given topic

Honestly I don't even enjoy coding AI features. The only value I get out of AI is translation (which I take with a grain of salt because I don't know the other language and can't spot hallucinations, but it's the best tool I have), and shitposting (e.g. having chatGPT write funny stories about my friends and sending it to them for a laugh). I can't say there's an actual productive use case for me personally.

garmin wants me to pay for some gen-ai workout messages on connect plus. Its the most absurd AI slop of all. Same with strava. I workout for mental relaxation and i just hate this AI stuff being crammed in there.

Atleast clippy was kind of cute.

Thank you! @LewisJEllis and I wrote a little framework for "vibe writing" that allows for writing in markdown and adding vibe-coded react components. It's a lot of fun to use!

It is indeed a working demo, hitting

  https://llm.koomen.dev/v1/chat/completions

More seriously, I think the reason companies don't want to expose the system prompt is because they want to keep some of the magic alive. Once most people understand that the universal interface to AI is text prompts, then all that will remain is the models themselves.

It's like the memes where people in the future will just grunt and gesticulate at the computer instead.

Loved those! How are those created?

I used that button in Outlook once and the summary was longer than the original email

"k"

> My pet theory is the BigCo's are walking a tightrope of model safety and are intentionally incorporating some uncanny valley into their products, since if people really knew that AI could "talk like Pete" they would get uneasy. The cognitive dissonance doesn't kick in when a bot talks like a drone from HR instead of a real person.

FTR, Bruce Schneier (famed cryptologist) is advocating for such an approach:

We have a simple proposal: all talking AIs and robots should use a ring modulator. In the mid-twentieth century, before it was easy to create actual robotic-sounding speech synthetically, ring modulators were used to make actors’ voices sound robotic. Over the last few decades, we have become accustomed to robotic voices, simply because text-to-speech systems were good enough to produce intelligible speech that was not human-like in its sound. Now we can use that same technology to make robotic speech that is indistinguishable from human sound robotic again. — https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/ais-and-robot...

Interestingly, it's just kinda hiding the normal AI issues, but they are all still there. I think people know about those "normal" looking pictures, but your example has many AI issues, especially with hands and background

> but can also fine tune them to be completely human

what does this mean? that it will insert idiosyncratic modifications (typos, idioms etc)?

honestly you could try this yourself today. Grab a few emails, paste them into chatgpt, and ask it to write a system prompt that will write emails that mimic your style. Might be fun to see how it describes your style.

to address your larger point, I think AI-generated drafts written in my voice will be helpful for mundane, transaction emails, but not for important messages. Even simple questions like "what do you feel like doing for dinner tonight" could only be answered by me, and that's fine. If an AI can manage my inbox while I focus on the handful of messages that really need my time and attention that would be a huge win in my book.

It all depends on how you use it, doesn't it?

A lot of work is inherently repetitive, or involves critical but burdensome details. I'm not going to manually write dozens of lines of code when I can do `bin/rails generate scaffold User name:string`, or manually convert decimal to binary when I can access a calculator within half a second. All the important labor is in writing the prompt, reviewing the output, and altering it as desired. The act of generating the boilerplate itself is busywork. Using a LLM instead of a fixed-functionality wizard doesn't change this.

The new thing is that the generator is essentially unbounded and silently degrades when you go beyond its limits. If you want to learn how to use AI, you have to learn when not to use it.

Using AI for social media is distinct from this. Arguing with random people on the internet has never been a good idea and has always been a massive waste of time. Automating it with AI just makes this more obvious. The only way to have a proper discussion is going to be face-to-face, I'm afraid.

About writing a counterargument for social media: I kinda get it, but what's the end game of this? People reading generated responses others (may have) approved? Do we want that? I think I don't.

It's what we want, though, isn't it? AI should make our lives easier, and it's much easier (and more productive) to review work already done than to do it yourself. Now, if that is a good development morally/spiritually for the future of mankind is another question... Some would argue industrialization was bad in that respect and I'm not even sure I fully disagree

What is the point? The effort to write the email is equal to the effort to ask the AI to write the email for you. Only when the AI turns your unprofessional style into something professional is any effort saved - but the "professional" sounding style is most of the time wrong and should get dumped into junk.

> They struggle to express their goals clearly, and AI doesn’t magically fill that gap—it often amplifies the ambiguity.

One surprising thing I've learned is that a fast feedback loop like this:

1. write a system prompt 2. watch the agent do the task, observe what it gets wrong 3. update the system prompt to improve the instructions

is remarkably useful in helping people write effective system prompts. Being able to watch the agent succeed or fail gives you realtime feedback about what is missing in your instructions in a way that anyone who has ever taught or managed professionally will instantly grok.

I have also experienced this in the specific domain of well-learned idiots finding pseudo-explanations for why a technical choice should be taken, despite not knowing anything about the topic.

I have witnessed a colleague look up a component datasheet on ChatGPT and repeating whatever it told him (despite the points that it made weren't related to our use case). The knowledge monopoly in about 10 years when the old-guard programming crowd finally retires and/or unfortunately dies will be in the hands of people that will know what they don't know and be able to fill the gaps using appropriate information sources (including language models). The rest will probably resemble Idiocracy on a spectrum from frustrating to hilarious.

> Most mail services can already do most of this

I'll believe this when I stop spending so much time deleting email I don't want to read.

Yeah but I'm looking forward to the point where this is not longer about trying to be flashy and sexy, but just quietly using a new technology for useful things that it's good at. I think things are headed that direction pretty quickly now though! Which is great.

Agreed! As i mentioned in the piece I don't think LLMs are very useful for original writing because instructing an agent to write anything from scratch inevitably takes more time than writing it yourself.

Most of the time I spend managing my inbox is not spent on original writing, however. It's spent on mundane tasks like filtering, prioritizing, scheduling back-and-forths, introductions etc. I think an agent could help me with a lot of that, and I dream of a world in which I can spend less time on email and finally be one of those "inbox zero" people.

Why can’t the LLM just learn your writing style from your previous emails to that person?

Or a your more general style for new people.

It seems like Google at least should have a TONNE of context to use for this.

Like in his example emails about being asked to meet - it should be checking the calendar for you and putting in if you can / can’t or suggesting an alt time you’re free.

If it can’t actually send emails without permission there’s less harm with giving an LLM more info to work with - and it doesn’t need to get it perfect. You can always edit.

If it deals with the 80% of replies that don’t matter much then you have 5X more time to spend on the 20% that do matter.

Writing an email with AI and having the recipient summarize it with AI is basically all the fun of jpeg compression, but more bandwidth instead of less.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaUIyvy8E8

>As I mentioned above, however, a better System Prompt still won't save me much time on writing emails from scratch.

>The thing that LLMs are great at is reading text and transforming it, and that's what I'd like to use an agent for.

Interestingly, the OP agrees with you here and noted in the post that the LLMs are better at transforming data than creating it.

A lot of people would love to have a 1970s secretary capable of responding to many mundane requests without any guidance.

Aside from saving time, I'm bad at writing. Especially emails. I often open ChatGPT, paste in the whole email chain, write out the bullets of the points I want to make and ask it to draft a response which frames it well.

There's a whole lot of people who struggle to write professionally or when there's any sort of conflict (even telling your boss you won't come to work). It can be crippling trying to find the right wording and certainly take far longer than writing a prompt. AI is incredible for these people. They were never going to express their true feelings anyway and were just struggling to write "properly" or in a way that doesn't lead to misunderstandings. If you can just smash out good emails without a second thought, you wouldn't need it.

AI for writing or research is useful like a dice roll. Terence Tao famously showed how talking to an LLM gave him an idea/approach to a proof that he hadn't immediately thought of (but probably he would have considered it eventually). The other day I wrote an unusal, four-word neologism that I'm pretty sure no one has ever seen, and the AI immediately drew the correct connection to more standard terminology and arguments used, so I did not even have to expand/explain and write it out myself.

I don't know but I am considering the possibility that even for everyday tasks, this kind of exploratory shortcut can be a simple convenience. Furthermore, it is precisely the lack of context that enables LLMs to make these non-human, non-specific connective leaps, their weakness also being their strength. In this sense, they bode as a new kind of discursive common-ground--if human conversants are saying things that an LLM can easily catch then LLMs could even serve as the lowest-common-denominator for laying out arguments, disagreements, talking past each other, etc. But that's in principle, and in practice that is too idealistic, as long as these are built and owned as capitalist IPs.

> If I can write a concise prompt with all the required information, why not save everyone time and just send that instead ?

This point is made multiple times in the article (which is very good; I recommend reading it!):

> The email I'd have written is actually shorter than the original prompt, which means I spent more time asking Gemini for help than I would have if I'd just written the draft myself. Remarkably, the Gmail team has shipped a product that perfectly captures the experience of managing an underperforming employee.

> As I mentioned above, however, a better System Prompt still won't save me much time on writing emails from scratch. The reason, of course, is that I prefer my emails to be as short as possible, which means any email written in my voice will be roughly the same length as the User Prompt that describes it. I've had a similar experience every time I've tried to use an LLM to write something. Surprisingly, generative AI models are not actually that useful for generating text.

People like my dad, who can't read, write, or spell to save his life, but was a very, very successful CPA, would love to use this. It would have replaced at least one of his office staff I bet. Too bad he's getting up there in age, and this newfangled stuff is difficult for him to grok. But good thing he's retired now and will probably never need it.

Shorter emails are better 99% of the time. No one's going to read a long email, so you should keep your email to just the most important points. Expanding out these points to a longer email is just a waste of time for everyone involved.

My email inbox is already filled with a bunch of automated emails that provide me no info and waste my time. The last thing I want is an AI tool that makes it easier to generate even more crap.

There was an HN topic less than a month ago or so where somebody wrote a blog post speculating that you end up with some people using AI to write lengthy emails from short prompts adhering to perfect polite form, while the other people use AI to summarize those blown-up emails back into the essence of the message. Side effect, since the two transformations are imperfect meaning will be lost or altered.

If that's the case, you can easily only write messages to your wife yourself.

But for the 99 other messages, especially things that mundanely convey information like "My daughter has the flu and I won't be in today", "Yes 2pm at Shake Shack sounds good", it will be much faster to read over drafts that are correct and then click send.

The only reason this wouldn't be faster is if the drafts are bad. And that is the point of the article: the models are good enough now that AI drafts don't need to be bad. We are just used to AI drafts being bad due to poor design.

Totally agree, for myself.

However, I do know people who are not native speakers, or who didn't do an advanced degree that required a lot of writing, and they report loving the ability to have it clean up their writing in professional settings.

This is fairly niche, and already had products targeting it, but it is at least one useful thing.

When it's a simple data transfer, like "2 pm at shake shack sounds good", it's less useful. it's when we're doing messy human shit with deep feelings evoking strong emotions that it shines. when you get to the point where you're trading shitty emails to someone that you, at one point, loved, but are now just getting all up in there and writing some horrible shit. Writing that horrible shit helps you feel better, and you really want to send it, but you know it's not gonna be good, but you just send it anyway. OR - you tell ChatGPT the situation, and have it edit that email before you send it and have it take out the shittiness, and you can have a productive useful conversation instead.

the important point of communicating is to get the other person to understand you. if my own words fall flat for whatever reason, if there are better words to use, I'd prefer to use those instead.

"fuck you, pay me" isn't professional communication with a client. a differently worded message might be more effective (or not). spending an hour agonizing over what to say is easier spent when you have someone help you write it

There are people who do this but on forums; they rely on AI to write their replies.

And I have to wonder, why? What's the point?

Do you want an LLM writing and sending important messages for you? I don't, and I don't know anyone who does. I want to reduce time I spend managing my inbox, archiving stuff I don't need to read, endless scheduling back-and-forths, etc. etc.

> Sure, at first you will want an AI agent to draft emails that you review and approve before sending. But later you will get bored of approving AI drafts and want another agent to review them automatically.

This doesn't seem to me like an obvious next step. I would definitely want my reviewing step to be as simple as possible, but removing yourself from the loop entirely is a qualitatively different thing.

As an analogue, I like to cook dinner but I am only an okay cook -- I like my recipes to be as simple as possible, and I'm fine with using premade spice mixes and such. Now the simplest recipe is zero steps: I order food from a restaurant, but I don't enjoy that as much because it is (similar to having AI approve and send your emails without you) a qualitatively different experience.

So here's where this all feels a bit "build me a better horse" to me.

You're telling an AI agent to communicate specific information on your behalf to specific people. "Tell my boss I can't come in today", "Talk to comcast about the double billing".

That's not abstracted away enough.

"My daughter's sick, rearrange my schedule." Let the agent handle rebooking appointments and figuring out who to notify and how. Let their agent figure out how to convey that information to them. "Comcast double-billed me." Resolve the situation. Communicate with Comcast, get it fixed, if they don't get it fixed, communicate with the bank or the lawyer.

If we're going to have AI agents, they should be AI agents, not AI chatbots playing a game of telephone over email with other people and AI chatbots.

Short reply:

I agree, it only goes half-way.

Elaboration:

I like the "horseless carriage" metaphor for the transitionary or hybrid periods between the extinction of one way of doing things and the full embrace of the new way of doing things. I use a similar metaphor: "Faster horses," which is exactly what this essay shows: You're still reading and writing emails, but the selling feature isn't "less email," it's "Get through your email faster."

Rewinding to the 90s, Desktop Publishing was a massive market that completely disrupted the way newspapers, magazines, and just about every other kind of paper was produced. I used to write software for managing classified ads in that era.

Of course, Desktop Publishing was horseless carriages/faster horses. Getting rid of paper was the revolution, in the form of email over letters, memos, and facsimiles. And this thing we call the web.

Same thing here. The better interface is a more capable faster horse. But it isn't an automobile.

> Seems like many, if not all, AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0.

This seems to be the case for most technology. Technology increasingly mediates human interactions until it becomes the middleman between humans. We have let our desire for instant gratification drive the wedge of technology between human interactions. We don't want to make small talk about the weather, we want our cup of coffee a few moments after we input our order (we don't want to relay our orders via voice because those can be lost in translation!). We don't want to talk to a cab driver we want a car to pick us up and drop us off and we want to mindlessly scroll in the backseat rather than acknowledge the other human a foot away from us.

Related short story: the whispering earring http://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.li...

> AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0. > But if AI is advanced enough - why would someone go see a movie that you generated instead of generating a movie for himself.

I would be the first to pay if we have a GenAI that does that.

For a long time I had a issue with a thing that I found out that was normal for other people that is the concept of dreaming.

For years I did not know what was about, or how looks like during the night have dreams about anything due to a light CWS and I really would love to have something in that regard that I could visualise some kind of hyper personalized move that I could watch in some virtual reality setting to help me to know how looks like to dream, even in some kind of awake mode.

Are you saying this is what you'd like to happen? That you would like to remove the element of human creation?

That sounds about right to me. Massive opportunity for startups to reimagine how software should work in just about every domain.

Sounds a lot like blockchain 10 years ago!

It's much easier to build targeted new things than to change the course of a big existing thing with a lot of inertia.

This is a very fortunate truism for the kinds of builders and entrepreneurs who frequent this site! :)