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by throwanem 426 days ago
Not if I want it able to have conversations with people, they don't.

I could see installing or implementing a custom client if there were some functionality that'd enable, but "support a conversation among two speakers" is something computers have done since well before I was born. If the wheel fits, why reinvent it?
1 comments
overfeed 426 days ago
If you're having conversations with people, then you don't control both ends and email is fine for that. Email is suboptimal for communicating between services/applications under your full control.
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throwanem 426 days ago
Consider the use case from the article: this is a family management support or "AI butler" application. So I control the end with the LLM on it, which I administer - but not necessarily the other, which is anyone in my family, not just me. So unless I want to try to make everyone use my weird custom AI messaging app like I aspire to Bay Area thought-cult leadership, I'm going to meet people where they are and SMTP's cheaper than SMS.

If I'm building myself a toy, then sure, I can implement whatever I want for a client, if that's where I get my jollies. React Native isn't hard but it is often annoying, and the fun for me in this project would be all in the conversation with the agent per se. Whatever doesn't get me to that as fast as possible is just getting in my way, you know?

And too, if this does turn out to be something that actually works well for me, then I'm going to want to integrate it with my phone's voice assistant, and at that point an app is required anyway - but if I start with a protocol and an app that that assistant already knows how to interact with, then again I have an essentially free if admittedly very imperfect prototype.

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overfeed 426 days ago
Under the hoods, is your AI butter one service or many? It would be not-great for your weather or family-event-calendar-management components to communicate with each other or the orchestrator via email.

Receiving an email from the AI-butler rescheduling or relocating a planned outdoors family event because rain is expected would be excellent, using IMAP to wire-up the subcomponents together would not.

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throwanem 426 days ago
Who suggested using email in the service layer? I mean, you're not wrong, but this feels like you handed me a banana and then said I should have picked a better hammer.

We're talking about a conversation that has a human on at least one end, so email makes sense. For conversations involving no humans, of course there are much better stores and protocols if something like an asynchronous world-writable queue is what we want.

"Number of humans in the conversation" wasn't the distinction you initially established, I believe, but I wonder if it's closer to the one you had in mind.

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