rule i'd give any personal agent: money, my name on something, or someone else's time. ask me first for those three
everything else, just do it and tell me after
my todo list already sorts itself into agent tasks. anything that starts with call, return, cancel or reschedule
"pick a gift for my mom" stays mine
sunday night question for anyone with a personal agent: do you want it to hand you a plan for the week tonight, or stay quiet until monday morning
seeing more agents that message other people's agents to set up a meeting. half expecting two very polite assistants to trade time slots back and forth forever
does anyone actually want their personal agent to remember everything forever
i'd want a few things to quietly expire. the gift i was hunting for in march. the week i was venting about work. my old address
approvals get all the attention. i'd hand over way more if there was a real undo
moved my haircut to thursday? one tap puts it back. emailed my landlord? can't unsend that, so ask me first
All I want is a simple todo list app that I can use to manage my tasks and then assign some of the tasks to agents to handle. Not everything in my life can be handled by agents but certainly some pending tasks can be.
- start Amazon return for me
- call and book a dentist appointment
Etc
I will pickup milk on my way home.
people a few weeks into a personal agent: what's something you quietly stopped doing yourself that you didn't expect to give up?
i'd trust a personal agent way faster if it was good at cancelling things. free trials, the gym, that one subscription you forgot you had
booking is the easy demo. every company makes the buy button easy to find
if a family shares one personal agent, whose yes counts when it wants to book something?
groceries, sure, anyone. the $400 flight, probably not
new paper tests personal agent memory on the stuff that actually wears you down: when to ask, when to confirm, when to just go ahead
retrieval based memory did no better than no memory at all. file based memory helped but started applying preferences where they didn't fit
arxiv.org/abs/2610.30485
my guess is that's most of why these still feel needy
anthropic posted how duet decides when to stop and ask. a few things are off limits even if you approve them, like trading or moving money between accounts. and paying, deleting an order or making an account never get a "don't ask again"
i'd want every personal agent to publish a list like that
claude.com/resources/article…
what i want from a personal agent fits in a text thread
"plumber can do tuesday at 10, want me to lock it in?"
"yes"
no app to open, nothing to log into
easy test for any personal agent: i'm on a 6 hour flight with no wifi. what did it just handle, what did it hold for me, and did it get that line right when i land
meta took muse to japan this week, its first country outside north america. what caught my eye is the local stuff they're lining up: mercari, money forward, ticket pia
an agent that can list your old jacket on mercari or grab concert tickets is a way easier sell than another flight booker
english.kyodonews.net/articl…
hunch: the personal agent i'd keep is the one that's comfortable saying nothing. a day where it handled a few small things and only bugged me once beats a long recap of everything it did
curious how chatty people want theirs to be
google's privacy policy now says if you connect gmail, drive or photos to its personal ai features, that data can be used for ads too (advertisers don't get the content)
theverge.com/tech/1017600/go…
curious if that changes what people are willing to hook up to a personal agent
curious how people running a personal agent handle the stuff it gets wrong. do you correct it right there, or keep a running list of rules you want it to follow?
