1/15/2025 at 2:53:32 PM
>Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps.Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."
by the_snooze
1/15/2025 at 3:39:30 PM
How is AI in email a good thing?!There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
by bambax
1/16/2025 at 2:24:43 AM
It's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?by ryandrake
1/16/2025 at 2:56:24 PM
There's a trend of people replying to posts/tweets/etc. with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'It's the modern equivalent of LMGTFY. The OP could just as easily written the same prompt themselves. The difference is that LMGTFY was an expression of irritation, smugness and hazing. The ChatGPT reply is just garrulous laziness. I expect and hope we'll develop social rules that mean this type of reply will be seen as passe.
by devnullbrain
1/16/2025 at 4:03:20 PM
At least a sarcastic LMGTFY got the person closer to an answer if they clicked the link. Asking ChatGPT is a dead-end.by SketchySeaBeast
1/16/2025 at 8:54:24 PM
The last time I got one of those lazy ChatGPT responses I wanted to just ban the person on the spot if I had moderator privileges. Just pages of dreck that looked like detailed information but was totally useless and a waste of time. I don't have a problem if people use ChatGPT and find it helpful, but it's hugely disrespectful to just copy and paste its output to other people without even a cursory review of it first.by ack_complete
1/16/2025 at 4:24:27 PM
Even worse is making an original post starting with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'by grajaganDev
1/16/2025 at 11:52:44 AM
Yes, when I see something written by AI I don't read it. Its a waste of time.by hoppp
1/16/2025 at 1:54:36 PM
That distinct feeling when reading AI is as if someone who wrote it was compelled to write more wordsby p0w3n3d
1/16/2025 at 2:22:09 PM
tl;dr: AI is looking to convey words. A good author is looking to efficiently convey information.Because that's literally what it is. Its an algorithm that is continuously asking itself, 'what is the most likely word I should say next?'
Whereas an author that is intending to communicate a point, will start with an idea, write a passage to explain the idea, and then edit their passage to the minimum number of words that most precisely, accurately, and succinctly communicates that idea.
by ep103
1/17/2025 at 4:05:38 PM
The most scary thing nowadays is that a lot of people fail Reverse Turing Test. They think that the thing there (the LLM) is thinking... They say "I told chat" etc. If high-ranking people will fail the test they are able to start using AI instead of thinking, or for example impose laws using AI...by p0w3n3d
1/16/2025 at 4:08:22 PM
I'll always love "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter."by SketchySeaBeast
1/16/2025 at 12:29:43 PM
Cold emails -- especially AI generated ones -- go directly to the trash in my mailbox.by reddalo
1/16/2025 at 12:37:44 PM
Same here, but AI is orthogonal to that. Spam is spam - there's no difference between one written by silicon-based LLM bot, and one written by protein-based low paid human bot.by TeMPOraL
1/16/2025 at 9:23:35 PM
This is untenable. I could be AI. You could be AI. The whole idea of value is going to change when there is 99.99% noise from AI, and genuine human created content will be hard to distinguish if at all.by madethisnow
1/16/2025 at 4:22:40 PM
My expectation is that:1: people will use ChatGPT to write their formal emails based on a casually written text 2: people will use ChatGPT to convert their emails from formal text to summaries\ 3: this will get automated by email providers 4: eventually the automation will be removed and we'll just talk in plain language again
by sz4kerto
1/16/2025 at 6:33:58 PM
I do #1 and it's great. I'm not sure why folks in this thread are sneering at what is a working English transpiler. I don't get to choose having to write formally at work sometimes but I can control how I deal with it.by Spivak
1/17/2025 at 8:23:59 AM
writing formally doesn't require using a lot of useless filler words though.by gtirloni
1/16/2025 at 7:52:49 PM
It is funny but it is genuinely a enormous waste of energy and money.by UltraSane
1/16/2025 at 2:41:04 AM
You can run it through AI to summarize it down to a sentence or two. It's like the telephone game but with computers.by Clubber
1/16/2025 at 10:50:52 AM
I'll buy the AI LLM that finds the prompt that was used based on the output, and replaces posts and emails by their prompt so I can actually understand the intention of the author and not spend my whole afternoon going through all bullet points with highly redundant information./s, of course, but not that unrealistic.
by rpigab
1/16/2025 at 12:46:19 PM
Not that /s, really. If you think about it, what a person writing a long-winded e-mail full of redundant text is doing, is the same work LLM is - they have a prompt in their mind, and they're generating text that "sounds nice" out of it.AI or not, it would be better if they just sent their prompt instead.
by TeMPOraL
1/16/2025 at 9:15:28 PM
If you don't have the original input, how would you determine the prompt that was used to generate the output?by babyshake
1/16/2025 at 10:17:16 AM
We’ve invented the worlds dodgiest decompression algorithmsby comradesmith
1/16/2025 at 7:03:52 AM
Then why did you even write more than two sentences in the first place, if nothing else matters? Why didn't you write a summary-line at the beginning, consisting of two sentences?AI will not replace human thinking, even though many people seem to believe and put their brain on stand-by.
It feels like someone wants to transport water from A to B and transports it as steam, just because _we can _.
by chrisandchris
1/16/2025 at 5:26:34 PM
If AI doesn’t replace human thinking, we will have to find something else that does, or just go without.by fijiaarone
1/16/2025 at 7:48:09 AM
This is the really hilarious ‘engineer thinking’ vs ‘normie’ thinking difference which rears its head sometimes.after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?
As long as we can all pretend they were thoughtful and meaningful, and someone isn’t using AI when making it (or just picking random crap off the shelf, and they removed the price tags) or using AI when reading it (aka making a big show of opening it, and then throwing them in the trash immediately after the person leaves), then we all get along. It even looks like we’re doing a ton of work/spending a ton of money to make the other person happy.
Not that anyone does any of the things I’m describing, just being hypothetical, obviously.
I suspect it will be obvious enough shortly it will go the way of the ‘popcorn bucket’ fad or the like, but for now…
by lazide
1/16/2025 at 12:44:37 PM
> after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?Making them feel good and "seen", obviously. This is perfectly expressible in "engineer thinking" (I won't say "quantifiable", because there's this meme that engineers see things in binary, whereas the reality is, math is perfectly fine with fuzzy ideas and uncertainty - it's the normies that can't handle those).
Hell, there are some game-theoretic approaches to maximize social ROI on gifts, but I won't go into those, especially that they tend to flip the sign on the return if the recipient learns about them.
by TeMPOraL
1/16/2025 at 9:23:36 AM
I get socks for Christmas and I like it.by pdhborges
1/16/2025 at 10:48:19 AM
Socks are the best gift everby shafyy
1/16/2025 at 4:13:26 PM
To quote Tim Minchin, "The old combination of socks, jocks, and chocolates is just fine by me."by SketchySeaBeast
1/16/2025 at 5:12:08 PM
Darn Tough from Vermont. Love them socks.by edoceo
1/16/2025 at 11:42:46 AM
"Normies" actually prefer to get a paragraph long email rather then three pages saying the same thing. AI is NOT adding just a few socially expected niceties. It adds huge amount of fluff.And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.
by watwut
1/16/2025 at 12:40:17 PM
> And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.Exactly that. For me, a lot of effort in structuring e-mails goes into making it look like text instead of bullet points, because some stupid social expectations, but then still making it bullet-pointed in nature, because if I don't, the typical normie recipient will do exactly what you said: ignore majority of it and answer random part.
(And then they'll somehow screw it up anyway, and I'll still have to chase them after that one critical question they conveniently forgot to address.)
by TeMPOraL
1/16/2025 at 12:18:12 PM
Popcorn buckets rocked though. Three kinds of popcorn!by Kye
1/16/2025 at 7:51:08 AM
My email is disliked due to its brevity, turning the single clear and concise sentence of into a multi paragraph treatise might just lead to promotions, raises and bonuses which I can trickle down through the economy.by blitzar
1/16/2025 at 12:26:24 AM
I think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmailby mcastillon
1/16/2025 at 7:58:59 AM
A reply of "sounds good" means the initial email has been read and its contents agreed upon. Ho would AI improve upon this?- sending "sounds good" even when the recipient hasn't, in fact, read the initial email => catastrophic alternative
- writing an elaborate email explaining in luxurious details why it in fact sounds good => not catastrophic, but costing time on the other side to read and understand, with zero added value
by bambax
1/16/2025 at 9:26:40 PM
it would be the delivery of the information and its context in the whole of your other content analyzedby madethisnow
1/16/2025 at 9:29:32 AM
Sounds good.by otikik
1/16/2025 at 2:18:09 AM
Email is a dated form of communication, that's why every other message platform will let you just like and heart stuff.by Boldened15
1/16/2025 at 3:43:16 AM
It's a paper trail for me. Companies, as we saw recently, can do whatever they want on company chat platforms. Emails are nearly impossible to fully delete if they ever have to escalate to a lawsuit, and can (YMMV based on policy) let you BCC important trails to your personal email.by johnnyanmac
1/16/2025 at 4:08:22 AM
If it's that important you can screenshot it. If you're BCCing every email you sent to your personal email that is (or should be) an IT policy violation.by gruez
1/16/2025 at 1:37:11 PM
Screenshots are trivial to forge. It is impossible to forge email that has passed through a server with proper DKIM setup.by homebrewer
1/16/2025 at 2:51:18 PM
At least on office365 internal emails aren't DKIM signed.by gruez
1/16/2025 at 5:16:46 AM
It’s no different than using IMAP or POP3 to download your messages. This is the beauty and curse of email. It’s sometimes too transparent. I prefer it.by be_erik
1/16/2025 at 5:17:51 AM
Yeah. It's not every email (I can probably count the number of times I did this on one hand). But if I feel like they're trying to bury some lead or simply want to CYA, I will try to at least download the email to the local machine (perfectly legimate) and BCC myself (Grey area) as an immitation of 3 backup strategies. I've never had to utilize thar BCC, fortunately.But yes, phone screenshot is another strategy with much less grey area. I'm just becoming more and more paranoid of some potential defense trying to accuse my photo of being doctored, especially with more and more AI tools available.
by johnnyanmac
1/16/2025 at 7:18:14 AM
Why is chat not a paper trail? Just yesterday I found a chat message that I had written in 2019 and I was surprised that I already back then knew things I did not know yesterday.(We are use zulip for chat which is better than everything else I have used since irc. But the search is too limited for someone who knows regexes.)
by usr1106
1/16/2025 at 11:14:48 AM
>Why is chat not a paper trail?Many reasons. First, chat doesn't exist. What exists is scores of incompatible chat apps.
I use WhatsApp but I consider WhatsApp messages throwaway because I keep losing them anyway. They are scattered across multiple phones with no way to merge them. Backups are platform specific. Exports don't contain any metadata and can't be imported.
"Chat" is a useless mess, not a paper trail.
For email, I have consistent backups with metadata across many email providers and email clients going back to 2008.
by fauigerzigerk
1/16/2025 at 7:39:06 AM
Because a company can revoke your access to the chat at any point in time. It's a one-sided paper trail.You can have an offline copy of emails and you can BCC them to your personal account if you want.
by amonith
1/16/2025 at 8:15:56 AM
This seems risky, I'm not a lawyer but BCC company emails to personal account seems like a nice way to pave a highway for the company's legal team to request court ordered access to your personal affairs.by crysin
1/16/2025 at 7:59:25 AM
According to most work contracts / NDAs you wouldn't be allowed to keep private copies of work email.If you are willing to violate that rule or the message affects your work contract which you are of course allowed to archive at least in zulip chat that's very simple (for a software person). They have a straightforward REST API. IIRC you can even choose between markdown source and HTML rendered output.
by usr1106
1/16/2025 at 12:56:32 PM
Because e-mail is naturally self-replicating and not bound to organizational boundaries, in ways chat isn't.Chat messages tend to exist in one place only (vendors' servers), with maybe a transient local copy that gets wiped over time, or "for privacy reasons" (like Messenger switching to E2EE, effectively wiping cached history on any device that went through the transition). Chat message is an object, it's designed to exist in a single place, and everything else is a pointer to it, or a transient cache.
E-mails, in contrast, are always copied in full. You send an e-mail to me, you retain an independent copy, I get an independent copy, and a bunch of servers in between us keep an independent copy too, even if briefly. I forward your e-mail somewhere, more people and servers get their copies. I reply back to you, more independent copies, that also quote the previous messages, embedding even more copies that are even more independent. This makes it very similar to paper correspondence (particularly when photocopy machines are involved), i.e. impossible for a single party to unilaterally eradicate in practice.
And then chat vendors implement silly features like ability to retroactively unsend a message, force-deleting it from recipients' devices too (it may still exist in backups, but vendors refuse to let you access those, even with a GDPR request). In e-mail land, that's fundamentally not possible.
(Microsoft tried to bolt it onto their corporate e-mail software, but it only works in Outlook/Exchange land, and it's easy to disable (at least was, in OG Desktop Outlook - not the still broken New Outlook Desktop Web App). I discovered this when I once saw an e-mail I was reading suddenly disappear from my Outlook, which prompted me to find the right setting to disable honoring unsend requests.)
So, come discovery time, critical chat history may turn out impossible to find, and any deeper search will require forcing cooperation of the chat operator. E-mails, on the other hand, tend to turn up, because someone, somewhere, almost certainly has a copy.
by TeMPOraL
1/16/2025 at 10:53:47 AM
Chat is a paper trail in finance at least. For regulatory purposes, bank personnel are not allowed to delete even their WhatsApp and other text messaging app info from their phones.by fakedang
1/16/2025 at 8:24:56 AM
Well, Microsoft did add "reactions" to Outlook and has been universally hated for it.by mrweasel
1/16/2025 at 9:20:58 AM
Wasn't the hate because of a botched implementation that ended up spamming the original sender or something?by gmueckl
1/16/2025 at 9:22:46 AM
Yeah, the reactions are just email messages with special headers, which as you say ends up spamming people who don't use Outlook. I think the hate was a mix of reaction to bad implementation and the concept in general.by mrweasel
1/16/2025 at 3:27:01 AM
"serious business" and "serious stuff" still happens over email, and in the same way, even "more serious business stuff" happens over snail mail still.by omeid2
1/16/2025 at 2:25:53 AM
I have 5000+ unread items.I've skimmed maybe 50% of them, but not enough to consider them "read". It's 99% bullshit. Even legitimate email is spam these days.
I'm too busy with other fake work to need to additional fake work managing pointless email comms.
by BLKNSLVR
1/16/2025 at 3:57:03 AM
I've adopted the inbox zero approach. If it's important it gets reclassified onto my task list with start and end dates, if it's useful info it gets filed, and everything else goes into trash.At this point I am thinking my Thunderbird should probably just unify the Inbox view and the Task view, since it would be a more accurate representation of how I view email.
by XorNot
1/16/2025 at 8:28:49 AM
I thought just now, isn't inbox zero just a cosmetic difference?For you: important things become tasks, useful things are filed, and everything else gets trashed.
For me: important things get opened and replied to. Useful things are starred (and opened). Everything else stays untouched.
And that pesky unread number is irrelevant because I mute all notifications. I'm not discounting your method, I am just now realizing the circle of it all.
by apsurd
1/16/2025 at 10:25:23 AM
There's a UX difference: when you look at your inbox from fresh you have to remember which ones you purposefully ignored because they were left unread in the inbox (this might be trivial for you if you're used to it).I practice inbox zero also, the value for me is knowing that if it's in my inbox it's because it requires actioning, if it's not it's ignored (deleted or archived).
I also just generally like deleting things as much as possible, I don't like the cruft. If I have to search through old emails I don't have to filter by stars or anything like that, I like knowing that if it exists it's because it's important.
by have_faith
1/16/2025 at 11:54:33 AM
Outlook now lets me like and heart emails, which feels weird but there it is.by BryantD
1/16/2025 at 12:51:58 PM
I conduct all of my business either in person, via email, or by phone. I use email when I want a paper trail.by quickthrowman
1/16/2025 at 9:00:32 AM
Proton has a nice feature for writing emails.They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I use almost always.
by mschild
1/16/2025 at 10:12:34 AM
You're aware we've had grammar/spell check since (checks) 1961 right? It's built right into your operating system.by jon-wood
1/16/2025 at 1:02:19 PM
Yes, I'm aware. What AI/Proton provides isn't just a simple spellchecker though. It specifically recommends and alters wording to better suit the overall sentence structure. Essentially, it considers the context better than any built-in checker I've had in the past.It's also really useful to for words that are spelt almost the same. Suit and Suite for example.
Also throughout my day, I'm constantly switching between 2 languages that have almost identically written words. Adress and Address. The normal spellchecks often don't mark it as an error because my computers and browsers naturally also have 2 installed keyboards and languages.
by mschild
1/16/2025 at 9:14:05 AM
Maybe you aren't in a space where it would be useful, but not everyone who has to write an email is a great and concise writer.I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.
by Popeyes
1/16/2025 at 10:03:04 AM
I worked with engineers daily for around 40 years and now I work with trades people daily. In general the trades people are better communicators.by tssva
1/16/2025 at 5:47:22 PM
Formal writing is just that.Alice: Hey, Bob, I finished the job, pay me
Letter: Blah blah blah, Bob, blah blah blah, $$$, blah blah blah
Bob: Oh, Alice is done, hey Charlie, pay her
Letter: Blah blah blah, Charlie, blah blah blah, Alice, blah, $$$, blah blah
Charlie: Ok, Alice is paid
Letter: Blah blah, Alice, blah blah, $$$, blah blah, bank account, blah
Alice: kthx
Letter: Blah blah blah...
by GuB-42
1/16/2025 at 12:07:49 AM
I like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...
by throwaway287391
1/16/2025 at 6:36:54 PM
Found it: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.htmlby Modified3019
1/15/2025 at 10:59:48 PM
It almost can't be a good thing. LLMs are only useful when given all the relevant context. When you write an email, the context is mostly in your head.by energy123
1/15/2025 at 11:30:22 PM
It isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened beforehand and all the documents around them.The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened.
Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
by llm_trw
1/16/2025 at 9:15:29 AM
What big model do/did you use?> gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite
What does that mean? That they got help, if they found the tech too complicated?
> Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal
Has this changed how people behave (yet)?
by cutemonster
1/16/2025 at 9:35:21 AM
This was about a year ago so it was Claude 3 Opus for summaries and interrogation. Since then pretty much anything over 70b is good enough.And baby sit means hire something between a secretary developer that makes sure that important meetings had the record bot invited, gave it a once over and then went back to the 70% of their job that was actual development.
by llm_trw
1/16/2025 at 6:17:10 PM
If you're a non native speaker trying to get the tone just right with recipients whom you don't know, it's invaluable.Sometimes I would spend 15 minutes writing a 3 or 4-line email of this kind. Not anymore.
by Al-Khwarizmi
1/16/2025 at 5:06:29 AM
My experience with LLMs expanding on bullet points is that they often enough misrepresent my intentions as a writer. Often in infuriatingly subtle ways.Same when summarizing, just less frequently.
As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
by andrei_says_
1/16/2025 at 12:30:14 PM
> How is AI in email a good thing?!> There's a cartoon going around (...)
Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need: for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient, the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the actual point they care about.
Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people finally realizing what they failed to realize all these decades: just send the goddamn bullet point. We don't need AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's time.
EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending AI-generated e-mails, to send the goddamn prompt instead. It carries all the information and much less noise.
I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the case in transactional or business communication - for that, just send the prompt.
by TeMPOraL
1/16/2025 at 5:20:15 AM
Google seems to have an advantage here; as the client on both ends in many emails, they could just check if this ai expand/summary process is occurring and if so just send the bullet point (or if they want to be really clever just pass the bullet point through a thesaurus, so nobody will notice even if the sender happens to see what the recipient got).by bee_rider
1/16/2025 at 6:15:15 AM
Oh boy the future is so underwhelming.by pjerem
1/16/2025 at 8:13:09 AM
Given how much compute these models take to run, I don't think there's any value in that.by mathw
1/16/2025 at 8:36:35 AM
what are people even worried about here? they're just trying things to see whether they're useful. don't expand your emails into long prose if it adds no value for you and they will focus on other things.by wilg
1/16/2025 at 4:35:06 PM
This is so funny I screamed laughed just reading over it XDby ra0x3
1/15/2025 at 4:53:42 PM
Do you happen to have a link for that comic?by hoyd
1/15/2025 at 4:59:22 PM
Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics.by ASalazarMX
1/15/2025 at 11:28:33 PM
Yes, that's the one.by bambax
1/16/2025 at 6:11:32 PM
hah that is wonderful. thank you.by monophonica
1/16/2025 at 7:52:20 PM
someday 99% of all computing power is going to be used to generate and summarize vast amounts of text.by UltraSane
1/16/2025 at 7:56:29 PM
The most inefficient protocol of the internet.by ttepasse
1/15/2025 at 10:45:05 PM
This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :Dby LtWorf
1/15/2025 at 11:28:19 PM
Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?by bambax
1/16/2025 at 1:35:40 AM
[dead]by Craighead
1/15/2025 at 5:12:52 PM
Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
by belval
1/15/2025 at 11:29:45 PM
This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.by anon84873628
1/16/2025 at 4:44:57 PM
I get where you are coming from with this, but in my opinion being able to give feedback in a clear and concise fashion is a skill that people should have. LLMs will help you elaborate but they will also add their own flair by choosing the actual work. You can think "wow that's actually what a better person of me would have written" but you are biasing yourself based on what the LLM understood of your prompt focusing on form over substance.But as the other comments mention it might just all be bullshit anyway.
by belval
1/16/2025 at 7:02:32 PM
The interesting thing about the LLM is that it uses its knowledge of our respective roles, overall product (which is public), and peer review process itself to refine and improve the output in ways I wouldn't have considered.I always put a lot of time into reviews before. Should I not use the tool to make something even better (within realistic time commitment)?
If I use an AI to create some cartoon graphics for a slide, should I have bettered myself by learning graphic design instead?
by anon84873628
1/16/2025 at 10:38:48 AM
> that aren't just BSHaving been on the receiving end of many of these, it absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who themselves have so little respect for their colleague's time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of actual genuine feedback.
The whole fucking point is to give them actionable feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it off as your own genuine thoughts.
by sensanaty
1/16/2025 at 3:03:31 PM
I'll take your word on the reviews you actually received.As for the commenter you are replying to, you dont have any specific information on the review. Yet you declared its hallucinated, generic, haphazardly thrown together, simply copy pasted, etc. Consider that your conclusions are based off an idea in your head and not his actual review.
by nonethewiser
1/16/2025 at 4:45:51 PM
Counterpoint: I'm not in the job of managing my colleagues, especially in paragraph-length business professional tone.by BeFlatXIII
1/16/2025 at 2:38:50 PM
If a colleague gave me LLM responses instead of genuine feedback I would never ask them for a review again. Which may be what they were going for. But sadly this is not what I wanted.Be better. Someone respected your opinion enough to go out and ask for it. Take a minute to reflect.
by 12345hn6789
1/15/2025 at 9:59:47 PM
> we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
by xnx
1/16/2025 at 12:39:56 AM
Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.by username223
1/16/2025 at 4:06:22 AM
Why do you think this is what performance review cycles are?by marnett
1/16/2025 at 7:12:01 AM
Because Amazon notoriously does "stack ranking". Also, I personally have been in a company going through mass layoffs and they totally use the EoY peer review as the metric to choose whose heads cut.by darkwater
1/16/2025 at 4:31:22 AM
obligatory citation (this was on HN a little while back) https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/11/03/metrics/by AceyMan
1/17/2025 at 9:04:41 PM
Indeed. When I'm in the office and keep my eyes and ears open, it is rather simple to pick out the ones who are slacking. Even moreso in meetings.Slackers tend to repeat the same thing over and over in progress meetings... 'I am blocked because... <insert external cause>' or 'I helped that guy figuring out... they did not have a clue'
Vs the more curious, get it done attitude: 'I tried this and that and it still doesn't work, but I learned that... hence I will aproach it from following angle... '
by nuancebydefault
1/16/2025 at 3:01:56 PM
> people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.It's more complicated than this.
The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.
Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.
by nonethewiser
1/15/2025 at 11:32:35 PM
I bet the reviews are evaluated by AI too—AI writes, AI evaluates, what could go wrong? :)by behnamoh
1/16/2025 at 2:39:53 PM
I hope it drives a cultural revival in appreciation of laconicism.by brobdingnagians
1/16/2025 at 2:22:06 AM
I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back meetings, and was looking forward to actually getting some work done when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation about priorities for the sprint planning session that's scheduled in a couple of hours.In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.
There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.
/rant
I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
by BLKNSLVR
1/16/2025 at 4:09:22 AM
The secret is to add every meeting into your Jira as a task, and then close it once the meeting is done.Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.
When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.
When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.
"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'
Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)
Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.
Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.
If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.
by bruce511
1/16/2025 at 5:11:08 AM
Thank you for this!I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work. If they don’t meet / waste everyone’s time, they are… unproductive.
For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Adding them to Jira and accounting for their cost is the way. Businesses understand money. Meetings are expensive.
Does your company log meetings as tickets?
by andrei_says_
1/16/2025 at 5:39:21 AM
Cunningly my company doesn't do meetings, at least not on the developer side. Obviously there are interactions but they are one-on-one and are not reoccurring.My experience though is consulting to large organizations. They have lots more people, more layers, and hence need more accountability. I get the need for that, but also see that balance is required. I help both sides understand the requirements of the other party, and help them find balance so that both sides win.
Part of that is helping programmers understand what managers need, and part of that is helping managers understand what programmers need.
Managers, for example, are happy to add everyone to every meeting. Workers usually prefer one on one time.
Equally co-workers often benefit from set-aside time for team meetings. This helps with in-team communication.
Information flow is necessary. Doing it well is better for everyone.
by bruce511
1/16/2025 at 7:58:17 AM
> I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work.This is a huge problem in all orgs of any size and one I battle with - misaligned incentives.
> For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Part of addressing the issue is to not be binary in your thinking. You'll lose the people you need to persuade. Some meetings are very productive and necessary for engineers. The goal isn't to get rid of all meetings as much as it's to only have productive meetings. When forced to only have productive meetings, fewer meetings naturally result.
by matwood
1/17/2025 at 9:09:36 PM
Indeed, a lot of needless stuff is getting done and a lot of stuff is done in wrong ways because of... no or bad communication! So simply saying 'too many meetings' does not cut it.by nuancebydefault
1/16/2025 at 9:58:58 AM
I don't blame you for getting angry.by tap-snap-or-nap
1/16/2025 at 2:29:23 AM
Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?by nine_zeros
1/16/2025 at 2:40:24 AM
You really have to schedule a meeting to discuss an upcoming meeting, so the upcoming meeting can be more efficient.(yes this happened to me before)
by Clubber
1/16/2025 at 6:37:06 AM
My favourite is the ole "Oh we need Dwayne for this one, let's schedule a follow-up tomorrow with him, and until then we can rough out a bunch of requirements only Dwayne possibly knows by... umm... Guessing?"I do not miss development.
by BeefWellington
1/16/2025 at 5:24:47 AM
I too ran a pre-IPM for years. I still would. Why would I waste an entire team’s time when I can just collaborate with 2 people first?by be_erik
1/16/2025 at 6:13:07 AM
Something I heard that stuck with me was that, for important business decisions, the "meeting" is almost ceremonial-only: to make the decision offical. Such meetings should essentially be fast, no digressions, just 'the biz'.All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few meetings (possibly including graft and corruption).
The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result is known and guaranteed.
This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).
by BLKNSLVR
1/16/2025 at 11:57:53 AM
How big's the org? This setup feels unavoidable past a certain company size as growth attracts grifters who then call meetings atop meetings to appear useful.Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
by intelVISA
1/16/2025 at 1:44:18 PM
It's more a case of team-member churn, requiring a near-constant re-establishment of work practises, alongside a number of over-officiated processes that are in a constant state of being re-engineered for efficiency because they're a constant source of "time drain away from actual progress". There's also a lot of tech debt that has only recently (in the past three years) been really focused on to grow out of. There's also a lot of complexity to the system(s) we work with and the combination of complexity and tech debt is neither pretty nor easy.Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
Yeah, except I have a visceral feeling of pressure to make progress and I don't want to be "one of those people" who don't work towards some kind of improvement. I had a bit of a rant today, and one of the leaders agreed with basically all of my points, although they said that there's a limited amount that can change in the immediate due to existing priorities. However, I'm still going to dedicate some time every day to map out how to improve on the status quo - this will further inhibit my actual task progress, but in the pursuit of a loftier goal (so, yes, potentially making it worse, but it'll feel like I might make things better...).
by BLKNSLVR
1/15/2025 at 4:07:22 PM
I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails and organize the info.Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
by nharada
1/15/2025 at 11:10:03 PM
That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.by rurp
1/16/2025 at 12:24:46 AM
I take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do, instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much easier for me to verify the script does what I want and then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs verifying the AI output if it did the task directly.I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
by jjnoakes
1/16/2025 at 4:39:29 AM
I used Gemini to do a similar task and for whatever reason, i found it performed better when i broke down the task into individual steps.by sagarkamat
1/16/2025 at 10:39:23 AM
These LLMs are excel at making more. More emails with more words. More blog posts with more fluff. Making it open to more people means more usage means more numbers being more which means more money for the people building these systems.I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.
by gherkinnn
1/16/2025 at 12:56:42 PM
Google's implementation of AI really shows the innovators dilemma in actionThese features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and $25m
by bobxmax
1/15/2025 at 3:36:13 PM
I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.by macNchz
1/15/2025 at 11:52:11 PM
I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?by shinycode
1/16/2025 at 12:40:05 AM
It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found it...not terribly useful.by macNchz
1/16/2025 at 6:27:39 AM
Yes you’re right. The handwritten notes I take I always keep them for myself. If I have to share something I clean it and summarize and type it by hand. I find useful to do it manually to make sure intent and comprehension are well transcribed from the meeting. If a person is not focused on the meeting then it could be worse. I’d rather not give this to an AI, again often context is key and unless you have access of month or years of cross history it might be difficult for an IA not to miss something. But it’s just a tool, everyone sees what tool fits nicelyby shinycode
1/16/2025 at 12:13:51 AM
Indeed.by tomrod
1/16/2025 at 8:29:20 AM
That does sound generally useful. Out of interest: Do you ever see a one hour meeting being summed up so brief that the participants question why they spend an hour on the meeting (or more realistically, question if the LLM understood the meeting at all).Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.
by mrweasel
1/15/2025 at 3:28:26 PM
I can hardly wait to use it as an excuse. "Oh sorry I didn't do that because it wasn't in the AI summary" ;)by ape4
1/15/2025 at 11:01:50 PM
I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.by radarsat1
1/15/2025 at 11:12:09 PM
So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the artificially intelligent fuck up.These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less work.
by herewulf
1/16/2025 at 4:11:34 AM
> The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails.Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.
by dragonwriter
1/16/2025 at 1:00:36 PM
I don’t use it often either, but sometimes it is very useful. When I caught Covid last fall my wife incorrectly thought I had it three times. I was using a beta Google Gemini, and paying for it, and I asked “read my @gmail and tell me the date ranges when I have had Covid.”That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more recently that didn’t work. Perhaps there is a routing model up front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for any given query?
Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year.
I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific tasks.
by mark_l_watson
1/16/2025 at 1:04:05 PM
Congrats on winning an argument against your wife. Billions well spent.by mvdtnz
1/17/2025 at 9:42:40 AM
I also find that summarising content helps me digest it better. I have to fully understand the source in order to write the summary. The process of writing a summary is of immense value. Sometimes the summary itself is of minimal value.by WhyNotHugo
1/15/2025 at 3:48:10 PM
> I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work.If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.
by n144q
1/16/2025 at 2:56:12 PM
> it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same thing. It can make going through the noise easier by intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the noise.
Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.
by nonethewiser
1/16/2025 at 12:02:36 AM
I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.by CobrastanJorji
1/16/2025 at 12:12:44 AM
I'm in this role for my company.There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool.
There is value for concise drafts.
I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.
by tomrod
1/16/2025 at 8:03:20 AM
I’m getting a lot of value out of NotebookLM drafting documents. If I’ve got a bunch of notes that need to be in a coherent design doc, it can give me a good enough first draft for me to edit into shape. Alternatively when I’ve got a design doc for something, but need to submit, say, a work request to another org, NotebookLM can take my doc and turn it into another format based on a doc template pretty nicely.These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.
by danpalmer
1/16/2025 at 1:14:57 PM
I only use NotebookLM a couple times a month, but when I use it I get value from it. I wanted to put out a new edition of a book I wrote last year so I ingested the PDF for the previous version of my book and some notes on what I was thinking of adding. Then in Chat mode I asked for suggestions of interesting topics that I didn’t think of and a few other questions, then got a short summary that I used as a checklist for things that I might add.I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.
by mark_l_watson
1/16/2025 at 11:27:41 AM
I feel quite the opposite.I’m not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM proofread my texts for me is great.
LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a LLM with data has limiited use as well.
by fsloth
1/15/2025 at 3:19:58 PM
I agree. I don't want all my existing work apps to take on LLM features I don't need.At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project.
by verdverm
1/16/2025 at 1:18:20 AM
I really want to like Gemini Deep Research but I have had a pretty low ROI with it. It fails because it has no ability to evaluate the quality of sources, so some SEOd to hell page has equal weight as the deep dive blog post of a highly invested individual. Its also very hard to steer unless you provide paragraphs of context, if you provide too little it might hyper focus on something you said and go into some random rabbit hole of research.by dimitri-vs
1/16/2025 at 4:00:01 AM
Man if only there was a company out there specializing in the ranking page quality on the web…by vrosas
1/16/2025 at 12:07:30 AM
I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff AI in everywhere".Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
by hn_throwaway_99
1/16/2025 at 1:09:00 AM
What if there was something that communicated the company’s top priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos? Would that be something you’d try?by thumbnailsketch
1/16/2025 at 4:23:59 AM
I for one would love to try.by treyfitty
1/16/2025 at 5:18:07 PM
> For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you, there are two likely possibilities:
1) The information is incredibly dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents, research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your will.) For these sorts of things, you should not rely on an LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the message.
2) The person sending it to you is bad at communicating, in which case the solution is help them learn better communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording into something comprehensible.
"But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?"
Then I see two obvious points to consider:
First, you should absolutely be telling them about the problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can phrase it in a way that isn't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message) but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?"
Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-noised, then part of your job is being able to "translate" their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad idea because, at some point or another they're going to be trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone.
Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.
by registeredcorn
1/16/2025 at 12:27:21 AM
Yeah I’m tired of workspace getting more expensive and me getting zero additional value from it. I don’t want this, didn’t ask for it, and it actively annoys me.by verelo
1/15/2025 at 7:06:37 PM
Enshittification #353: solving cuStomers problems has poor ROIby cyanydeez
1/16/2025 at 11:14:40 AM
It's decent at searchby FergusArgyll
1/16/2025 at 7:44:26 AM
Well, that’s because you’re thinking as someone who likely has a stake in quality/specific outcomes actually happening. Or was raised/grew up in an environment where that was important.Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of feelings. And something often has to give, and it’s usually feelings. It’s also hard to not be cranky or even angry if someone has to constantly be the one ‘not having fun’ or cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart.
There is huge market demand exactly for what you’re complaining about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as possible, precisely because being clear/concise, etc. helps with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of course they’ll consider that bad.
For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that it’s always busy, but never seems to get anything done. Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc.
Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets decided.
People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that makes that ugly wall look pretty again.
by lazide
1/16/2025 at 11:27:00 AM
management uses them to fluff up their emails and I use them to boil the emails down to actionable bullet points.by exe34