AI Horseless Carriages

Heh, I would love to just be able to define email filters like that.

Don't need the "AI" to generate zaccharine filled corporatese emails. Just sort my stuff the way I tell it in natural language.

And if it's really "AI", it should be able to handle a filter like this:

if email is from $name_of_one_of_my_contracting_partners check what projects (maybe manually list names of projects) it's referring to and add multiple labels, one for each project

I don’t want to sound like a paid shell for a particular piece of software I use so I won’t bother mentioning its name.

There is a video editor that turns your spoken video into a document. You then modify the script to edit the video. There is a timeline like every other app if you want it but you probably won’t need it, and the timeline is hidden by default.

It is the only use of AI in an app that I have felt is a completely new paradigm and not a “horseless carriage”.

I can't picture a single situation in which an AI generated email message would be helpful to me, personally. If it's a short message, prompting actually makes it more work (as illustrated by the article). If it's something longer, it's probably meaningful enough that I want to have full control over what's being written.

(I think it's a wonderful tool when it comes to accessibility, for folks who need aid with typing for instance.)

I think the gmail assistant example is completely wrong. Just because you have AI you shouldn’t use it for whatever you want. You can, but it would be counter productive. Why would anyone use AI to write a simple email like that!? I would use AI if I have to write a large email with complex topic. Using AI for a small thing is like using a car to go to a place you can literally walk in less than a couple minutes.

favorite quote from this article:

"The tone of the draft isn't the only problem. 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."

> let my boss garry know that my daughter woke up with the flu and that I won't be able to come in to the office today. Use no more than one line for the entire email body. Make it friendly but really concise. Don't worry about punctuation or capitalization. Sign off with “Pete” or “pete” and not “Best Regards, Pete” and certainly not “Love, Pete”

this is fucking insane, just write it yourself at this point

Theory: code is one of the last domains where we don't just work through a UI or API blessed by a company, we own and have access to all of the underlying data on disk. This means tooling against that data doesn't have to be made or blessed by a single party, which has let to an explosion of AI functionality compared with other domains

Our support team shares a Gmail inbox. Gemini was not able to write proper responses, as the author exemplified.

We therefore connected Serif, which automatically writes drafts. You don't need to ask - open Gmail and drafts are there. Serif learned from previous support email threads to draft a proper response. And the tone matches!

I truly wonder why Gmail didn't think of that. Seems pretty obvious to me.

What if you send the facts in the email. The facts that matter: request to book today as sick leave. Send that. Let the receiver run AI on it if they want it to sound like a letter to the King.

Even better. No email. Request sick through a portal. That portal does the needful (message boss, team in slack, etc.). No need to describe your flu "got a sore throat" then.

Software products with AI embedded in them will all disappear. The product is AI. That's it. Everything else is just a temporary stop gap until the frontier models get access to more context and tools.

IMO if you are building a product, you should be building assuming that intelligence is free and widely accessible by everyone, and that it has access to the same context the user does.

I love that kind of article. So much that I'd like to find a system prompt to help me write the same quality paper.

Thanks for the inspiration!

I like the article but question the horseless carriage analogy. There was no horseless carriage -> suddenly modern automobile.

Using AI for writing emails is kind of crazy. Why not just email the prompt, the other side can decode it

This is our exact approach at Missive. You 100% control system prompts. Although, it's more powerful... it does take more time to setup and get right.

https://missiveapp.com/blog/autopilot-for-your-inbox-ai-rule...

One idea I had was a chrome extension that manages my system prompts or snippets. That way you could put some context/instructions about how you want the LLM to do text generation into the text input field from the extension. And it would work on multiple websites.

You could imagine prompt snippets for style, personal/project context, etc.

Question from a peasant: what does this YC GP do everyday otherwise, if he needs to save minutes from replying those emails?

Hey Pete --

Love the article - you may want to lock down your API endpoint for chat. Maybe a CAPTCHA? I was able to use it to prompt whatever I want. Having an open API endpoint to OpenAI is a gold mine for scammers. I can see it being exploited by others nefariously on your dime.

This is excellent! One of the benefits of the live-demos in the post was that they demonstrated just how big of a difference a good system prompt makes.

In my own experience, I have avoided tweaking system prompts because I'm not convinced that it will make a big difference.

I thought this was a very thoughtful essay. One brief piece I'll pull out:

> Does this mean I always want to write my own System Prompt from scratch? No. I've been using Gmail for twenty years; Gemini should be able to write a draft prompt for me using my emails as reference examples.

This is where it'll get hard for teams who integrate AI into things. Not only is retrieval across a large set of data hard, but this also implies a level of domain expertise on how to act that a product can help users be more successful with. For example, if the product involves data analysis, what are generally good ways to actually analyze the data given the tools at hand? The end-user often doesn't know this, so there's an opportunity to empower them ... but also an opportunity to screw it up and make too many assumptions about what they actually want to do.

This is exactly how I feel. I use an AI powered email client and I specifically requested this to its dev team a year ago and they were pretty dismissive.

Are there any email clients with this function?

Always imagined horseless carriages occurred because that's the material they had to work with. I am sure the inventors of these things were as smart and forward thinking than us.

Imagine our use of AI today is limited by the same thing.

The only missing piece from this article is: the prompt itself should also be generated by AI, after going through my convos.

My dad will never bother with writing his own "system prompt" and wouldn't care to learn.

Great post. I’m the founder of Inbox Zero. Open source ai email assistant.

It does a much better job of drafting emails than the Gemini version you shared. Works out your tone based off of past conversations.

I found the article really insightful. I think what he's talking about, without saying it explicitly, is to create "AI as scripting language", or rather, "language as scripting language".

It sounds like developers are now learning what chess players learned a long time ago: from GM Jan Gustafsson: 'Chess is a constant struggle between my desire not to lose and my desire not to think.'

It is an ethical violation for me to receive a message addressed as "FROM" somebody when that person didn't actually write the message. And no, before someone comes along to say that execs in the past had their assistants write memos in their name, etc., guess what? That was a past era with its own conventions. This is the Internet era, where the validity and authenticity of a source is incredibly important to verify because there is so much slop and scams and fake garbage.

I got a text message recently from my kid, and I was immediately suspicious because it included a particular phrasing I'd never heard them use in the past. Turns out it was from them, but they'd had a Siri transcription goof and then decided it was funny and left it as-is. I felt pretty self-satisfied I'd picked up on such a subtle cue like that.

So while the article may be interesting in the sense of pointing out the problems with generic text generation systems which lack personalization, ultimately I must point out I would be outraged if anyone I knew sent me a generated message of any kind, full stop.

A note on the produced email. If I have 100 emails to go through, like your Boss probably does have to. I would not appreciate the extra verbosity of the AI email. AI should instead do this

Hey Garry,

Daughter is sick

I will stay home

Regards,

Me

We've been thinking along the same lines. If AI can build software, why not have it build software for you, on the fly, when you need it, as you need it.

Wow epic job on the presentation. Love the interactive content and streaming. Presumably you generated a special API key and put a limit on the spend haha.

Thanks for writing this! It really got me thinking and I also really like the analogy of "horseless carriages". It's a great analogy.

Loving the live demo

Also

> Hi Garry my daughter has a mild case of marburg virus so I can't come in today

Hmmmmm after mailing Garry, might wanna call CDC as well...

> has shipped a product that perfectly captures the experience of managing an underperforming employee.

new game sim format incoming?

Gmail supports IMAP protocol and alternative clients. AI makes it super simple to setup your own workflow and prompts.

Fantastic post asking apps to empower user by letting them write their own prompts

This is exactly what we have built at http://inba.ai

take a look https://www.tella.tv/video/empower-users-with-custom-prompts...

Something I'm surprised this article didn't touch on which is driving many organizations to be conservative in "how much" AI they release for a given product: prompt-jacking and data privacy.

I, like many others in the tech world, am working with companies to build out similar features. 99% percent of the time, data protection teams and legal are looking for ways to _remove_ areas where users can supply prompts / define open-ended behavior. Why? Because there is no 100% guarantee that the LLM will not behave in a manner that will undermine your product / leak data / make your product look terrible - and that lack of a guarantee makes both the afore-mentioned offices very, very nervous (coupled with a lack of understanding of the technical aspects involved).

The example of reading emails from the article is another type of behavior that usually gets an immediate "nope", as it involves sending customer data to the LLM service - and that requires all kinds of gymnastics to a data protection agreement and GDPR considerations. It may be fine for smaller startups, but the larger companies / enterprises are not down with it for initial delivery of AI features.

I clicked expecting to see AI's concepts of what a car could look like in 1908 / today

You've heard sovereign AI before, now introducing sovereign system prompts.

this is beside the point of the post, but a fine-tuned GPT-3 was amazing with copying tone. So so good. You had to give it a ton of examples, but it was seriously incredible.

ChatGPT estimates a user that runs all the LLM widgets on this page will cost around a cent. If this hits 10,000 page view that starts to get pricy. Similarly for running this at Google scale, the cost per LLM api call will definitely add up.

The most interesting point in this is that people don't/can't fully utilize LLMs. Not exposing the system prompt is a great example. Totally spot on.

However the example (garry email) is terrible. If the email is so short, why are you even using a tool? This is like writing a selenium script to click on the article and scroll it, instead of... Just scrolling it? You're supposed to automate the hard stuff, where there's a pay off. AI can't do grade school math well, who cares? Use a calculator. AI is for things where 70% accuracy is great because without AI you have 0%. Grade school math, your brain has 80% accuracy and calculator has 100%, why are you going to the AI? And no, "if it can't even do basic math..." is not a logically sound argument. It's not what it's built for, of course it won't work well. What's next? "How can trains be good at shipping, I tried to carry my dresser to the other room with it and the train wouldn't even fit in my house, not to mention having to lay track in my hallway - terrible!"

Also the conclusion misses the point. It's not that AI is some paradigm shift and businesses can't cope. It's just that giving customers/users minimal control has been the dominant principle for ages. Why did Google kill the special syntax for search? Why don't they even document the current vastly simpler syntax? Why don't they let you choose what bubble profile to use instead of pushing one on you? Why do they change to a new, crappy UI and don't let you keep using the old one? Same thing here, AI is not special. The author is clearly a power user, such users are niche and their only hope is to find a niche "hacker" community that has what they need. The majority of users are not power users, do not value power user features, in fact the power user features intimidate them so they're a negative. Naturally the business that wants to capture the most users will focus on those.

> When I use AI to build software I feel like I can create almost anything I can imagine very quickly.

Until you start debugging it. Taking a closer look at it. Sure your quick code reviews seemed fine at first. You thought the AI is pure magic. Then day after day it starts slowly falling apart. You realize this thing blatantly lied to you. Manipulated you. Like a toxic relationship.

Excellent essay. I loved the way you made it interactive.

Does anyone remember the “Put a bird on it!” Portlandia sketch? As if putting a cute little bird on something suddenly made it better… my personal running gag with SaaS these days is “Put AI on it!”

> And the best part of all? Teaching a model like this is surprisingly fun.

Given the painfully slow feedback look of LLMs and their inconsistent output. e.g. a good system prompt may be good on the first n examples, but then fall apart thereafter. I can say either Pete is being disingenuous, or "You're very busy" is not true, or Pete has a very interesting indifference function. Or maybe Pete is a VC, and he's just talking his own book.

This is nonsense, continuing the same magical thinking about modern AI

A much better analogy is not " Horseless Carriage" but "nailgun"

Back in the day builders fastened timber by using a hammer to hammer nails. Now they use a nail gun, and work much faster.

The builders are doing the exact same work, building the exact same buildings, but faster

If I am correct then that is bad news for people trying to make "automatic house builders" from "nailguns".

I will maintain my current LLM practice, as it makes me so much faster, and better

I commented originally without realising I had not finished reading the article

While Koomen makes valid points about the limitations of current AI implementations like Gmail's assistant, I think even his analysis misses a more fundamental insight: we're in a transitionary period that will eventually lead to a very different communication paradigm.

The article focuses on giving users control of their System Prompts to personalize AI outputs, but this approach still assumes a world where humans are both crafting and consuming messages directly. What's missing is consideration of how communication will evolve when AI agents exist on both sides of exchanges.

Consider these scenarios that exist simultaneously during this transition:

- Senders using AI, recipients who aren't

- Recipients using AI to process messages, senders who aren't

- Eventually: AI agents on both sides

In this final scenario, the actual transport format becomes less important. In fact, more formal, verbose messages with additional metadata might be preferable as they provide context for the receiving agent to process appropriately.

Imagine a future where you simply tell your AI, "Let everyone know I won't be in today," and your agent determines:

1. Who needs to be told

2. What level of detail each recipient requires

3. What context from your calendar/activities is relevant

On the receiving end, the recipient's agent would:

1. Summarize the information based on relevance

2. Determine if follow-up is needed

3. Automatically reschedule affected meetings

Most importantly, these agents could negotiate with each other behind the scenes. If your message lacks critical information, the recipient's agent might query yours for details: "Is this a one-day absence or longer? Are there pending deliverables affected?" Your agent would then provide relevant details without bothering you.

This agent-to-agent negotiation seems far more likely than what Koomen proposes - users meticulously crafting System Prompts to personalize their communications. In practice, most people don't want to configure systems; they want systems that learn their preferences through observation and feedback.

Rather than focusing on making current AI implementations mirror human communication styles more precisely, perhaps we should be designing for the eventual world where AI mediates most routine communication, with detailed configuration being the exception rather than the rule.

The real "horseless carriage" thinking might be assuming humans will remain directly in the loop for routine communications at all.

I suspect the "System prompt" used by google includes way more stuff than the small example that the user provided. Especially if the training set for their llm is really large.

At the very least it should contain stuff to protect the company from getting sued. Stuff like:

* Don't make sexist remarks

* Don't compare anyone with Hitler

Google is not going to let you override that stuff and then use the result to sue them. Not in a million years.

How many horses = canned dog food after the automobile? How many programmers = canned dog food after the AI?