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> Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?

I agree that removing items and taking pictures takes more effort than it saves, but I would use a simpler solution if one existed because it turns out I cannot remember what we have. When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the fridge or pantry in the basement.

> Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar?

In the morning I typically check my work calendar, my personal calendar, the shared family calendar, and the kids' various school calendars. It would be convenient to have these aggregated. (Copying events or sending new events to all of the calendars works well until I forget and one slips through the cracks...)

> If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload?

Yes, this is the problem I have. This doesn't look like a suitable solution for me, but I understand the need.

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> When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have and to check I look in the fridge or pantry in the kitchen and then go downstairs to the fridge or pantry in the basement.

We used to have a similar problem until we made a policy that if you use something up you add it to our shared shopping list, usually with a voice command to Siri. Whenever someone is at the store we just check the list, making sure we mark off things that are purchased.

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> In the morning I typically check my work calendar, my personal calendar, the shared family calendar, and the kids' various school calendars. It would be convenient to have these aggregated. (Copying events or sending new events to all of the calendars works well until I forget and one slips through the cracks...)

But... calendar apps already let you aggregate your calendars into a single view. Even if you have them on separate accounts (or some other impediment), you can easily share a read-only version of, say, your work calendar with your personal account so that you can have them combined in the morning.

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We have forgotten the simple, reliable solutions of the past - a grocery list on the fridge, a weekly planner, a weekly plan itself rather than constant coordination. Cell phones and easy communication led us here.
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That is most of the "productivity" bubble, with AI or not. You are trying to fit everything into tightly defined processes, categories and methodologies to not have to actually sit down and do the work.
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>Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?

Am I missing this in the article? Do you mean the shoes he's holding? He explains it immediately.

>when i visited REI this weekend to find running shoes for my partner, i took a picture of the shoe and sent it to clawdbot to remind myself to buy them later in a different color not available in store. the todo item clawdbot created was exceptionally detailed—pulling out the brand, model, and size—and even adding the product listing URL it found on the REI website.

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Yes you are missing the picture where Brandon asks Linguini to add a reminder to buy a pair of Arc'Teryx gloves, which Brandon is holding in his hands.
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The image and the text don't match. The image is talking about gloves, but in the narrative he says "when i visited REI this weekend to find running shoes for my partner, i took a picture of the shoe and sent it to clawdbot to remind myself to buy them later in a different color not available in store."
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Wouldn't it have been better if Clawdbot continued to monitor the website for when it came back in stock and snipe purchased it as soon as it did? Can't we move beyond lists of things and take action?
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    - Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them?
Had to go back because I skimmed over this screenshot. I have to presume it's because this guy who books $600 Airbnb's for vacation wants to save a couple bucks by ordering them on Amazon.
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Wouldn't it be faster to buy them on Amazon then?
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> Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings.

I dont know about AirBNB specifically, but I know local hotels I have dealt with can swing by 1000 bucks. Especially if theres a conference or something in town. Often it will swing back just before they risk the room going unoccupied. I have no idea if AirBNB allows similar behavior but I would be surprised if it didnt.

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This is how I perceive a lot of the AI being rammed down our throats: questionably useful.
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That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the technology or the science works. They just know how to shout persuasively.

I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming that full self-driving has done for driving. It will be a long time before it's perfect but it's already useful. I also think someone is going to make a Blockbuster quality movie with AI within a couple years and there will be much fretting of the brows rather than seeing the opportunity to improve the tooling here.

But I'll make a more precise prediction for 2026. Through continual learning and other tricks that emerge throughout the year, LLMs will become more personalized with longer memories, continuing to make them even more of a killer consumer product than they already are. I just see too many people conversing with them right now to believe otherwise.

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> That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the technology or the science works. They just know how to shout persuasively.

These people have taken over the industry in the past 10 years.

They don't care anything about the tech or product quality. They talk smooth, loud, and fast so the leaders overlook their incompetence while creating a burden for the rest of the team.

I had a spectacular burnout a few years ago because of these brogrammers and now I have to compete with them in what feels like a red queen's race where social skills are becoming far more important than technical skills to land a job.

I'm tired.

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These people have taken over every industry and society at large.
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Social skills to get my computer to do what I want still blows my mind. Or having to talk back to it. Claude said it couldn't do something, and the way around that was too tell it "yes you can". What a weird future we live in.
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Claude said it couldn't do something, and the way around that was too tell it "yes you can".

  >kill dragon

  With what?  Your bare hands?
  >yes

  Congratulations!  You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare
  hands!  (Unbelievable, isn't it?)
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What social skills? You can write in broken English and still have good results. It’s a statistical language , not a living being. No need for empathy, pleading, accusing, or manipulating. It transforms languages, any mapping from text to action was implemented by someone. And it would be way easier to have such mapping directly available.
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It transforms languages into the most likely human response. Humans are more likely to respond to rudeness with rejection.
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I do not doubt that AI and AI-powered and -native applications will become part of the fabric of our personal and professional lives.

What I don't understand is why, outside of "because I can", people need to automate parts of life I did not know the existence of.

- Why, outside of edge cases, do people have to automate the payment of bills beyond the automatic cc processing? - How many times a month do they have to set up their barber appointment?

It seems to me that the applications of Clawd and similar tools either automate trivial stuff or work on actions and circumstances that should not be there.

As an example, the other day I had a doctor visit, and between filling forms online, filling other forms online, confirming three times I would have been there and that I filled the online forms, driving to the doctor's office, and waiting, I probably spent 2 hours of my time (the visit was 2 months after I asked for it, by the way).

The visit lasted 5-7 minutes: the doctor did not have a look at the forms I filled out beforehand, and barely listened to what I was telling him during the visit.

I worry that, since "AI" will do it, there will be more forms to be filled that nobody will read, more forms to be filled to confirm that AI or me or a guardian filled the forms, and longer wait times because AI will bombard our neurons with some entertainment.

But what I want is a visit with a doctor who listens to me, they are not in a rush, and have my problem solved. If AI helps, it's great, but I don't want busy work done by AI, I don't want, because it is not needed, busy work at all.

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> I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming that full self-driving has done for driving.

Approximately nothing?

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Questionably useful at the cost of personal computer components doubling. Unquestionably shafting the personal computer market.
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Very much to the point. "Bots to remind one to check one's reminder" summarizes it all.

Note that the tendency to feel overwhelmed is rather widespread, particularly among those who need to believe that what they do is of great import, even when it isn't.

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Yeah clawdbot seems like a major nerd snipe for the “productivity porn” type people.
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> Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have?

Yeah, the sane solution here is much simpler. Put a magnet whiteboard. When you put something into the fridge, add it to the whiteboard. When you take something out, you erase that item from the whiteboard.

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Isn’t the sane solution to just generally have an idea what’s in there, and take a look if you’re not sure?
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Yeah, a lot of these AI "uses" feel like solutions looking for a problem.

It's the equivalent of me having to press a button on the steering wheel of my Tesla and say "Open Glovebox" and wait 1-2 seconds for the glove box to open (the wonders of technology!) instead of just reaching over and pressing a button to open the glovebox instantly (a button that Tesla removed because "voice-operated controls are cool!"). Or worse, when my wife wants to open the glovebox and I'm driving she has to ask me to press the button, say the voice activated command (which doesn't work well with her voice) and then it opens. Needless to say, we never use the glovebox.

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Tesla removed all the buttons because separately designed buttons are expensive. The glovebox button is different from the wiper button. Touchscreens are cheap because you only need one variety.
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I know why they did it. I still don’t like it (and our next car won’t be a Tesla) and its an annoying case of “new technology” (to save costs or whatever reason) that is worse than the “old technology” but sold as “better” because AI blah blah
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I really appreciate your condensing of the AI problem. I think the only thing it's missing is that at least 5% of the time, when you tell it to open the glovebox it tells you it's already open and leaves it closed, or turns on your turn signals.
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We have built a magic hammer that can make 100 houses in a second, but all the houses are slightly wonky, and 5% of their embedded systems are actively harmful.
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and the houses are ant sized
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I understand your sentiment but nitpicking on this nonetheless: the passenger can easily open the glovebox from the touchscreen on their own.
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True though I would take exception with “Easily” - have you seen how many taps you have to do? Not something you want to attempt while driving and certainly not easier than a hardware button.
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It's helpful to keep in mind that 'AI Twitter' is a bubble. Most people just don't have that many 'important' notes and calendar items.

People saying 'Claude is now managing my life!11' are like gearheads messing with their carburetor or (closer to this analogy) people who live out of Evernote or Roam

All that said I've been thinking for a while that tool use and discrete data storage like documents/lists etc will unlock a lot of potential in AI over just having a chatbot manipulating tokens limited to a particular context window. But personal productivity is just one slice of such use cases

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I have really severe ADHD. Agents are lifesaving to me. Literally.
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Artificially creating problems to justify the technology being used.
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> Why do you need price trackers for airbnb?

More importantly, can Clawdbot even reliably access these sites? The last time I tried to build a hotel price scraper, the scraping was easy. Getting the page to load (and get around bot detection) was hard.

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Yes, being on your own devices makes it not look like bots.
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Yes, and no in my experience.
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sounds like they want to be a puppet for their own life
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> Just remember what you have?

This is one of the stupidest things I have read on this site

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This is how billions of people across the planet manage their pantries. Get off this site and talk to real people more often.
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Billions of people don't use calendar apps so they're useless; just remember your meetings.

Billions of people don't use todo list apps so they're useless; just remember what to do.

Billions of people don't use post-its apps so they're useless; just remember what you're going to write down.

Billions of people don't have cars; just walk.

You can dismiss any invention since industrial revolution with this logic.

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Funnily enough at least in my personal anecdotic case it works about like that. I do just remember when my meetings will be (or look up where the meeting was decided on), do try to remember what I had planned (sometimes I forget, but almost always for the better), and written notes are rare enough that pen and paper are sufficient. And also don't have a driver license. I don't think my case is exactly rare, even among softdev croud.
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The point, as I noted below, is that this is an impractical solution.

You can justify the value of any ridiculous invention by comparing it to a world-changing invention.

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You have soundly defeated that strawman, well done.
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And I am pretty sure every single one of those "billions of people" have had the experience of returning back from the grocery store, only to realize they were actually out of eggs.
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Not the kindest take (and unlikely true).
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Do you have that much trouble remembering what is in your fridge to consider this the stupidest thing you have ever read on this site? I feel superhuman.
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GP might be hyperbolic but come on.

Common internet tropes include both "look at this forgotten jar that's been in the back of my fridge since 1987" and "doesn't it suck how much food we waste in the modern world?"

Nearly every modern invention could be dismissed with this attitude. "Why do you need a typewriter? Just write on paper like the rest of the world does."

"Why do you need a notebook? Just remember everything like the rest of us do."

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The solution being discussed involves someone removing everything from their fridge, photographing it and paying for an LLM to process it into a database of sorts. Further, in order for this database to be complete they need to repeat this process every time something changes in their fridge. Also will the LLM be able to tell if my carton of milk is 10% empty? I do not disagree that food waste is a problem, but the solution seems laughably impractical, and the default (memory) seems far better suited to the task. I can confidently say that the net value creation is not comparable to the written word.
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Oh don't get me wrong, the solution is lacking and is probably a worse outcome than just remembering.

But suggesting "Why not just try remembering lol" isn't really a valid criticism of the process. What you said here is a real criticism that actually adds to the conversation.

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He says it is for better integration between his messages and his calendar.

But this is already built-in with gmail/gcalendar. Clawdbot does take it one step further by scraping his texts and WhatsApp messages. Hmmm... I would just configure whatever is sending notifications to send to gmail so I don't need Clawdbot.

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