Using Work/Codex I'm continually amazed at how far my experience is from the popular AI memes like "this will destroy all jobs" and "AI is useless and is about to crash and take the economy with it."
My experience feels like I'm in an Iron Man movie. I get up in the morning, I turn on the voice chat mode, and while I'm making my coffee I ask it to highlight any important emails I received overnight. I then babble to it a bit with my initial reactions to those emails, and tell it to draft responses based on my thoughts, which it does.
By the time I start work I've got draft emails to review and I've had time to think about the ideas a bit more, the upshot is that I'll get a day's worth of email done in 20 minutes and probably make better decisions than I would have otherwise. By no means does this eliminate my job, just make me better at it and more productive. I can get into the day's deep work sooner now.
Going into that two-way voice mode with all your Connectors available is a big part of the gain here, sometimes you just want to walk and talk through something. It seems you can't get both of those simultaneously in the mobile app yet and when you can that'll be a huge gain, like go take a walk in the garden, talk through your thoughts, the appropriate drafts and other artifacts are ready for you to finalize when you return to your desk. This stuff is honestly space age.
I don't have much experience with Claude so if it also has that two way voice mode and can use its version of Connectors on mobile while that's turned on, I should give it another shot.
Not to come across as dismissive of your job, but if a "day's worth of email" can be done in 20 minutes now, it to me mostly highlights that it was mostly busy-work with little value and could have had another process? Good that AI improved upon the old process, though.
Assuming your first sentence is accurate, I would disagree with the second. Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. That still wastes resources and stresses the system, which makes it worse by hiding problems that will bite you in the future.
For example, say you deal with 100 emails a day. 90 of those are pointless busy-work and 10 are meaningful. It takes you all day. Now you begin using an LLM. You still have to separate the 90 from the 10 but then have the LLM reply with the 90 and leave the 10 for yourself because they are important and you have to make sure they’re done right. It now takes you a fraction of the day, so what happens is you start taking on more and more email¹. You’re now at 300 a day, with 270 busy-work and 30 meaningful (same ratio as before). Then one day your LLM breaks (ran out of tokens; a model was retired; bad connection; your powerful local machine broke down) and now you’re flooded by email and don’t even have time to separate the bad from the good, let alone prioritise and reply. If you had instead fixed the busy-work problem, you’d have been fine.
¹ Let’s be real: Work expands to fill the allotted time (Parkinson's Law). Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work.
> The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster.
Good luck trying to bring this through your typical bigco process management. Either your initiative dies, having gotten caught in a spider web of red tape, or it succeeds but now half your colleagues are angry at you to the point there's a non-zero chance of you getting beaten up, because now they have to do actual work or leave the niche they have made themselves comfortable coasting in for 20 years.
Office politics is even worse than actual politics.
“You won’t have luck implementing a sensible solution on a dysfunctional system” is an evergreen answer which doesn’t offer any insight. It’s a cop-out and discourages any attempts at improving anything.
Not everyone works for big corporations, and of those who do some work in departments with sensible bosses where they can make some change.
As an exaggerated example, we could also say “one way to resolve issues in a community is to gather the people involved and have them talk through their issues in a room with an experienced impartial mediator to help guide the discussion” and then have someone reply “good luck trying that at a maximum security prison where inmates are constantly confined to solitary and beaten by the officers”. Yeah, no shit. You have to adapt your solutions to your environment, but that’s no reason to dismiss a general starting concept.
Having a name for these "thought-killing statements" or "thought-terminating cliches" has helped me recognize them in all sorts of settings in my life. Corporate, social, religious, the list goes on.
It makes sense as humans that we do many things to simplify things or even eliminate them in order to save energy and avoid stress, and we should be careful to recognize a need for balance while still working towards some greater goal, purpose, or good.
Even so, much like kerning, once you are aware of it, it is painfully difficult to ignore.
Half of her organization has just a calendar filled with meetings.
And without meeting the organization would find that you only really need a third of the people, and you would even likely increase the overall output.
Many time wastes are just designed to make people busy, not productive.
It's kinda my point, though, that it's busy "manager" work if it really can be answered by an LLM. So yeah, getting answer from someone like Elon is exactly as useful as just asking the LLM myself.
I mean, I can't stop people from emailing me. I get over a hundred non-spam, non-mailing-list emails on some days. I'm not able to respond to most of them. I'm often not expected to, I'm just being copied in as a FYI. The AI is able to assess subject and intent well enough to determine what should receive my limited time, and through the voice interface it converts "making coffee" time into "composing email" time. I do read every email that's sent to me eventually, but it can take several weeks in some cases. I don't let AI reply to anything for me, but I'm happy to have it propose a draft.
I'm using mu4e as my MUA and one the things that it offers are actions (something similar in mutt is macro) where you can map a keybind to some code that do something to the current message or the set of selected messages. This is generally the reason that a lot of mailing list recipients (high volume of messages) use those software, where you can refile messages very quickly leaving the more thoughtful reply things for later.
I think something concerning is that your email has become a sluth and for people wanting to contact you and not your AI agent how do they break through that 2FA step
I feel like in near future the meme about "it's all just chatbots emailing each other" will actually be true. I wonder when I will receive my first AI generated email and will I bother to respond to it at all
It's already here. My company received an AI generated bug report the other day, and my AI employee ("R. Axiom") noticed, analyzed it, prepared a fix, tested it and replied to it. I wasn't involved, although I will review, merge and release the fix.
Surely passing untrusted input to a agent with execution capabilities and also possibility to reply to the same author, couldn't possibly be used for anything negative? Parent is probably using a firewall so it's A-OK :thumbs_up:
> Surely passing untrusted input to a agent with execution capabilities
Oh hey, I know this one! It’s humans and a phishing test, they’ll click on all the links and enter information without checking the domain properly!
Personally, I’d like systems that aren’t open to attack and can be depended upon. But it seems like nowadays NOTHING can be trusted - not OSes (recent Qubes OS exploit, not even mentioning others), not any software written in languages without memory safety, not even the ones with (Log4j comes to mind), not the packages in many package managers, not other humans and sure as hell not the token prediction machines. What a world.
We all probably live with a 0.XX% chance of getting pwned any given day.
> But it seems like nowadays NOTHING can be trusted - not OSes (recent Qubes OS exploit, not even mentioning others),
Clearly you feel alarmed, but it's important to base these "alarm" feelings on actual evidence and real concrete proof of something being bad. You clearly don't have a proper understanding of the exploit, so please take a moment to re-read what actually happened and how it would be exploited in practice, particularly the "the scope of this attack is smaller than it sounds" comment chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496918
Overall, I agree with you though, and it's a healthy perspective to be safer rather than sorrier, so living with the assumption that getting pwned any day is a non-zero chance/risk is probably the best approach and what I personally do too.
We'll see how it goes, but the product in question (Conveyor) is a downloadable tool that's got deliberately unobfuscated bytecode in it, with lots of detailed logging. AI is perfectly capable of reverse engineering it and in fact this bug report contained such a reversing. So even if someone tricks it into revealing source code or similar, they won't get anything that isn't already obtainable via other methods. This isn't a SaaS where security through obscurity might conceivably help, or where the codebase might contain credentials by mistake.
It's a developer tool and this level of trust helps customers debug their own problems quickly. If someone wants to break the law, they'll get a legal answer, but it's never been a problem.
The bot in question cannot write to master though, only open up pull requests from its own isolated repository.
It's a bet on modern models being more resistant to confusion attacks than they were before. The harness setup also makes it very clear to the model where input comes from. This might be a bad bet, but if it's not, then it's helpful for customers to get help right away.
Correct! I think we need a naming convention that lets us quickly understand if we're talking to a human or a machine. The R. prefix (meaning Robot) is unobtrusive and familiar to anyone who has encountered Asimov's stories. It will also generalize to humanoid LLM/VLA powered actual robots in future.
When do you get to enjoy your morning? And when does your family get to enjoy time with you? You're working when you wake up, working while you make coffee, working while you walk through the garden. Is that really space age? It sounds more like TikTok doomscrolling but for techies.
IMO these tools introduce faux productivity while taking away your free time and making you work more.
It's not the techs fault. This person chose to use it this way. They could have also carved out 20 mins at the start of their workday to do the same thing
I disagree. They could've carved out 20 minutes at the start of their workday to do the same thing, but that's explicitly at the start of their workday – not during their free time. I don't know anything about this person, but I know that if I were using these tools the way they do, it would mean the complete obliteration of what little semblance of work/life balance that I have left.
As someone who hasn't used Work or Codex but has used Claude Code and Pi a lot, may you describe how to set this up? I'm interested enough to try this out
You'll need a subscription ($20 tier should be fine) and then need to add "connectors" to your services (Gmail, 365, etc) so that it can access them. Then you just use the Claude Cowork (Or ChatGPT equivalent) tabs and chat with it.
It might be hidden somewhere or they’re doing A/B testing. Cowork was part of the left sidebar for Claude but when I was looking for it, it was gone. I had to do a search query to find it.
I consider myself fairly AI native. I was absolutely blown away by how frictionless it felt the other day interfacing with codex using the experimental headless app server on my VPS and using voice mode on my phone connected to it while I had my browser open having a conversation about making edits to my website.
The site uses Astro to hot load edits and so the exceptional Live voice model would use some filler words in response to me asking for an edit and before I knew it, the page had refreshed with the fix.
When people talk about things like OpenClaw and Hermes being a new operating system paradigm this is the sort of UX that comes to mind.
And simply conversing with it with my phone in my pocket and air pods on its the closest I've felt to a live conversation with AI ever.
Kudos to the voice mode and Live voice model teams.
My experience feels like I'm in an Iron Man movie. I get up in the morning, I turn on the voice chat mode, and while I'm making my coffee I ask it to highlight any important emails I received overnight. I then babble to it a bit with my initial reactions to those emails, and tell it to draft responses based on my thoughts, which it does.
By the time I start work I've got draft emails to review and I've had time to think about the ideas a bit more, the upshot is that I'll get a day's worth of email done in 20 minutes and probably make better decisions than I would have otherwise. By no means does this eliminate my job, just make me better at it and more productive. I can get into the day's deep work sooner now.
Going into that two-way voice mode with all your Connectors available is a big part of the gain here, sometimes you just want to walk and talk through something. It seems you can't get both of those simultaneously in the mobile app yet and when you can that'll be a huge gain, like go take a walk in the garden, talk through your thoughts, the appropriate drafts and other artifacts are ready for you to finalize when you return to your desk. This stuff is honestly space age.
I don't have much experience with Claude so if it also has that two way voice mode and can use its version of Connectors on mobile while that's turned on, I should give it another shot.