I’ll See it When I Believe It
Agentic, eh? Aye.
Get ready for an anecdote. And, if you know me, a particularly well-trod one. But at the end of it is an app I just built. (I know, I’m as surprised as anyone else.)
Some years back, I was in Liberia spending my time with former child soldiers from Charles Taylor’s faction, the NPFL. One thread that ran through reporting on the civil war surrounded the supernatural beliefs of the fighters, many of whom believed that going into battle wearing fetishes—jewelry, wedding dresses, etc.—or nothing at all, stark naked—conjured magic that protected them from bullets. Lurid details easy to exoticize, but less easy to understand. Too many reporters stepped into this trap—I wanted to avoid it, so I asked a fighter what he thought of this. Did they really believe this? He didn’t outright dismiss it. It just wasn’t for him—as if he was talking about Steely Dan. I asked him to elaborate. He was a Christian, he reminded me, and that sort of magic wasn’t for those who believed in God. You needed a more animistic view of the world. But, then he shrugged and said, “if you believe in it, it works for you.”
I could’ve been in Ojai.
A lot of talk about artificial intelligence sounds like this. The sort of self-reinforcing mysticism that clearly isn’t indigenous to Silicon Valley. But, it’s getting a pretty intense workout in discussions of the promise of AI. Which, let’s be frank, isn’t intelligence — it’s something, though.
And as if that question has been settled, we’re on to agentic AI: the intelligence that is somehow smart enough to do your job, but not smart enough to get out of the business of working for a living.
Jokes aside, I was curious: could I build an agent to do a task for me?
The answer: if you believe in it, it works for you. Kind of.
So, here’s Threde.ai. A completely free—no doubt, imperfect—agent that reads the newsletters stacking up in your Gmail, prioritizes the stories you should read, and creates a digest that you can read each morning. And then jump off to the real, original reporting.
None of this can touch the experience of reading the physical newspaper. But, as I tinker with it, I’m going to work to recreate a version of it. That mixture of editorial wisdom and topical kismet you’ll only find with ink on your fingertips.
Have at it. Tell me how it breaks.