The worst proactive agent is an email inbox filter that competes for your attention
manosaie · x · 2026-10-23
The author argues the worst form of a proactive personal agent is essentially an updated email inbox filter: with everything already competing for attention, nobody needs software that claims to help but adds noise. Building genuinely useful proactive agents will require ground-truth evals against the real world and feeding back to companies what useless proactiveness looks like — a hard path.
Related event: The Worst Personal Agent Is Just an Upgraded Email Filter(2 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- One-line instruction beats long tool descriptions: MCP eval hits 18/20 vs 3/10 — colinmcnamara · 2026-10-23
- MCP Tip: One-Line Instructions Beat Long Tool Descriptions, 18/20 vs 3/10 in Evals — colinmcnamara · 2026-10-23
- DynaLM: Open-Source CPU-First LLM Inference Engine Seeks Feedback — Unlikely_Safety_7456 · 2026-10-23
- Software factories as code: Warp runs agents, runners and model routers from markdown/YAML repos — vikvang1 · 2026-10-23
- Dev uses Codex to remotely root a Samsung TV and strip eMudhra root certificates — charliermarsh · 2026-10-23
- Raindrop launches Change Reports to track how agent changes perform in production — HamelHusain · 2026-10-23