[gs17]

It's really bizarre at this point. I'm okay with things like having one-click options for simple replies like "That time works for me" (Google Messages on Android is hilariously bad at these but it's at least useful occasionally). I'm not okay with it suggesting a whole point-by-point response to someone else.

Today I had an email from a colleague where it had a suggested reply so large it didn't fit in the preview box. The response was the usual LLM "sounds good but doesn't say anything" prose. It's not just unhelpful — it's a waste of everyone's time!

[al_borland]

One could argue the “That time works for me” prompts are also a waste of time, especially when only occasionally useful. Do we really need a button to type 5 words on an occasional basis?

I’ve used the button before, but I think my life would be exactly the same without it.

[gs17]

I have to wonder if they just give us the illusion of being useful.

Just had an email asking if I could meet "tomorrow at 5:00 PM, or would 6:30 work better?". The suggestions were "I will be there at 6", "Tonight works" or "Either time works", only one of which is even valid! Maybe for every time it saves me a few seconds, there's at least one where I have to read them all and realize none fit before writing what I would have done without the quick replies.

[Paracompact]

Even "either time works" is only half-valid! If the other party has already declared their openness to either option, proper etiquette is to just select one so you can both move on with your lives.

[archi42]

That's actually a use case that I imagine could work well, if done well. Especially in fully integrated systems like GMail or our corporate Exchange, when the LLM can access enough data to produce meaningful suggestions.

IMHO the UX problem is, as the article points out in so many words, shoving AI slop down our collective throats as if we were geese waiting to be fattened.

[swyx]

then you dont deal in high enough email volume

[latexr]

If you’re getting so much email you can’t type five words, a button with wrong suggestions isn’t the solution either. Create your own text snippets with text expansion software and use those. They’ll always be correct and will truly save you time.

[swyx]

let me try a different tack - 99% of the value is in the affirmation of the response and the demnonstration of responsiveness, not the actual content value of the 5 words. you could send a thumbs up emoji, you could send a ".", just the "seen" and "acked" value is the value of that 5 word button

[al_borland]

Which again underscores the question of why we need an auto-generated response when a thumbs up will do.

Of course a reply is valuable, but are those options really saving any real time vs a quick single word acknowledgement, which is often faster than even reading and considering the options?

[RugnirViking]

I do recommend this. Recently started making good use of one and its been a pretty cool change.

[ToucanLoucan]

Are we shocked, really? We have evidence from discovery of them actively making search results worse to pad query volume. Of course they’re using enabled-by-default, run-without-asking AI features to pad Gemini usage.

The Valley is tripping over themselves to convince the world fancy autocomplete is worth 800 billion.

[jerf]

The economic tension of these "run by default" AIs is quite hilarious once you see it.

On the one hand, the relevant KPIs of whoever is driving this product needs to be able to show AI usage is increasing, because AI usage is obviously the Platonic embodiment of goodness [1].

On the other hand, these things are expensive, so while it's mandatory that Google searches stuff these things in our faces, they are also horribly underprovisioned. If my only exposure to AI was the various search engine popups or the other free AIs, or even the bullet-point AIs that I'm nominally paying for but not really, like in Office, I would also have a pretty negative view of AI. I use DuckDuckGo more than Google but whatever model they may nominally be using to power their search result summarizer, it is de facto at least two years behind the state of the art in a very fast moving industry. It frequently gets things exactly backwards and is clearly leaning on its internal model a lot more than the links it has supposedly read, and clearly has a thinking budget of "indistinguishable from zero", and I don't know what kind of summarized web page content is being fed to it but it must be getting brutally dismembered in whatever summary is being fed to the AI.

The debate about how useful AI you pay for may rage on, but at least at this point in 2026, I'd say the AI you can get for free is every bad thing anyone says it is.

[1]: I believe there is a lot of useful things current AI can do, but there is no level of quality AI can ever reach in which AI usage for the sake of using AI will ever be a terminal good. Honestly any manager, whether they be a line manager or a CEO of a multinational company, that has ever pushed that in any capacity, should be fired for demonstrating gross incompetence for that position. It's "second or third week of Econ 101" or so that you learn about why it's never a good idea to just open the checkbook and spend an unbounded amount of money on something, and nothing you'll learn further down the line will ever contradict that.

[iknowstuff]

It’s not bizarre once you realize it raised some team’s engagement metrics (like # of emails sent) by 2%, a result they were unable to achieve otherwise, so they shipped it and celebrated a win

[busymom0]

> it's a waste of everyone's time!

Plus it's a huge waste of natural resources for the energy usage!

[A_Venom_Roll]

I see what you did there :)