Packy McCormick framed a swarm of personal AI agents as a source of leverage, saying he has Poke, Instinct, Muse, Dot, Grok Bot, Pickle and other agents “doing my bidding.” Then came the catch: all of them text him at once when an unimportant email arrives.
The joke captures the attention problem at the center of the conversation. More assistants can also mean more alerts for one person to sort.
When protectiveness becomes noise
Sar Haribhakti described that tradeoff from his own experience. He said he quickly went from being impressed by agents’ protective behavior to feeling annoyed by it. Getting that behavior right takes repetition, he wrote, but the user may burn out before the system is tuned well enough.
Other replies pushed the idea into satire. Leo Polovets called swarms of AI agents high leverage, then joked that recommending every new agent to fellow venture capitalists amounted to “a DDoS attack on productivity and attention”. McCormick added that there were bonus points for convincing competitors to invest in them.
Christian Keil extended the joke by wondering how long it would take for the agents to start messaging the user about one another’s messages forever.
None of the posts measures whether a personal-agent swarm produces more work than distraction. Together, they sketch the practical tension raised by the participants: more automation can mean more parallel help, but it can also create another layer of coordination and notifications for the person at the center.
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