Comment by petekoomen

Comment by petekoomen a day ago

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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.

Retric a day ago

The counter argument is some people are terrible at writing. Millions of people sit at the bottom of any given bell curve.

I’d never trust a summery from a current generation LLM for something as critical as my inbox. Some hypothetical drastically improved future AI, sure.

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  • petekoomen a day ago

    Smarter models aren't going to somehow magically understand what is important to you. If you took a random smart person you'd never met and asked them to summarize your inbox without any further instructions they would do a terrible job too.

    You'd be surprised at how effective current-gen LLMs are at summarizing text when you explain how to do it in a thoughtful system prompt.

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    • Retric a day ago

      I’m less concerned with understanding what’s important to me than I am the number of errors they make. Better prompts don’t fix the underlying issue here.

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      • ben_w 19 hours ago

        Indeed.

        With humans, every so often I find myself in a conversation where the other party has a wildly incorrect understanding of what I've said, and it can be impossible to get them out of that zone. Rare, but it happens. With LLMs, much as I like them for breadth of knowledge, it happens most days.

        That said, with LLMs I can reset the conversation at any point, backtracking to when they were not misunderstanding me — but even that trick doesn't always work, so the net result is the LLM is still worse at understanding me than real humans are.

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derektank a day ago

For the case of writing emails, I tend to agree though I think creative writing is an exception. Pairing with an LLM really helps overcome the blank page / writer's block problem because it's often easier to identify what you don't want and then revise all the flaws you see.

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rahimnathwani a day ago

  instructing an agent to write anything from scratch inevitably takes more time than writing it yourself
But you can reuse your instructions with zero additional effort. I have some instructions that I wrote for a 'Project' in Claude (and now a 'Gem' in Gemini). The instructions give writing guidelines for a children's article about a topic. So I just write 'write an article about cross-pollination' and a minute later I have an article I can hand to my son.

Even if I had the subject matter knowledge, it would take me much longer to write an article with the type of style and examples that I want.

(Because you said 'from scratch', I deliberately didn't choose an example that used web search or tools.)

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