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crote04/23/20252 repliesview on HN

I think a big problem is that the most useful AI agents essentially go unnoticed.

The email labeling assistant is a great example of this. Most mail services can already do most of this, so the best-case scenario is using AI to translate your human speech into a suggestion for whatever format the service's rules engine uses. Very helpful, not flashy: you set it up once and forget about it.

Being able to automatically interpret the "Reschedule" email and suggest a diff for an event in your calendar is extremely useful, as it'd reduce it to a single click - but it won't be flashy. Ideally you wouldn't even notice there's a LLM behind it, there's just a "confirm reschedule button" which magically appears next to the email when appropriate.

Automatically archiving sales offers? That's a spam filter. A really good one, mind you, but hardly something to put on the frontpage of today's newsletters.

It can all provide quite a bit of value, but it's simply not sexy enough! You can't add a flashy wizard staff & sparkles icon to it and charge $20 / month for that. In practice you might be getting a car, but it's going to look like a horseless carriage to the average user. They want Magic Wizard Stuff, not invest hours into learning prompt programming.


Replies

petekoomen04/24/2025

> 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.

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sanderjd04/23/2025

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.

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