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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.