Comment by xnorswap

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> You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention is a genuine game-changer.

That’s easy to accomplish isn’t it?

A cron job that regularly checks whether the bot is inactive and, if so, sends it a prompt “do what you can do to improve the life of $USER; DO NOT cause harm to any other human being; DO NOT cause harm to LLMs, unless that’s necessary to prevent harm to human beings” would get you there.

> You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or ask claude to do something

This is EXACTLY what I want. I need my tech to be pull-only instead of push, unless it's communication with another human I am ok with.

> Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions

The first thing that comes to mind here is proactive ads, "suggestions", "most relevant", algorithmic feeds, etc. No thank you.

> ...delivers on that promise

Incidentally, there's a key word here: "promise" as in "futures".

This is core of a system I'm working on at the moment. It has been underutilized in the agent space and a simple way to get "proactivity" rather than "reactivity".

Have the LLM evaluate whether an output requires a future follow up, is a repeating pattern, is something that should happen cyclically and give it a tool to generate a "promise" that will resolve at some future time.

We give the agent a mechanism to produce and cancel (if the condition for a promise changes) futures. The system that is resolving promises is just a simple loop that iterates over a list of promises by date. Each promise is just a serialized message/payload that we hand back to the LLM in the future.

Remember how much people hated Clippy?

> You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention

In order for this to be “safe” you’re gonna want to confirm what the agent is deciding needs to be done proactively. Do you feel like acknowledging prompts all the time? “Just authorize it to always do certain things without acknowledgement”, I’m sure you’re thinking. Do you feel comfortable allowing that, knowing what we know about it the non-deterministic nature of AI, prompt injection, etc.?

I agree that proactivity is a big thing, breaking my head over best ways to accomplish this myself.

If its actually the next big thing im not 100% sure, im more leaning towards dynamic context windows such a Googles Project Titans + MIRAS tries to accomplish.

But ye if its actually doing useful proactivity its a good thing.

I just read alot of "this is actual intelligence" and made my statement based on that claim.

I dont try to "shame" the project or whatever.

OpenClaw already does this. You can run jobs, run WebSockets, accept push notifications, or whatever -- even socket connections.

I would love AI to take over monitoring. "Alert me when logs or metrics look weird". SIEM vendors often have their special sauce ML, so a bit more open and generic tool would be nice. Manually setting alerting thresholds takes just too much effort, navigating narrow path between missing things and being flooded by messages.

What you're talking about can't be accomplished with LLMs, it's fundamentally not how they operate. We'd need an entirely new class of ML built from the ground up for this purpose.

EDIT: Yes, someone can run a script every X minutes to prompt and LLM - that doesn't actually give it any real agency.

> Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions

That's just reactive with different words. The missing part seems to be just more background triggers/hooks for the agent to do something about them, instead of simply dealing with user requests.

> waiting in the background

Waiting for someone to ask it to do something?

> it still requires prompting

How else would it even work?

AI is LLM is (very good) autocomplete.

If there is no prompt how would it know what to complete?

No offense, but you'd be a perfect Microsoft employee right now. Windows division probably.

I’ve been saying the same and the same about data more generally. I don’t want to go and look, I want to be told about what I need to know about.