I’ve always looked for ways to make impossible tasks (getting out of bed in the morning) easier to do.
And there’s no bigger kryptonite than repetitive grunt work.
And in the search for a way out I tried COMET. The new Perplexity browser.
Now at first glance this is google chrome with a crappy adblock and some “AI Assistant” glam.
The biggest change is that looking something up on the search bar takes you to Perplexity AI search instead of google search.
So I started with some simple research tasks.
It did those very well. Perplexity is one of the best AI tools for searching. It’s ten times better than Google.
But the biggest selling point of Comet is the “AI assistant” mode that “does” stuff for you.
Sounds very neat, right?
So I hook up Notion and start asking it to do grunt work.
One of those is adding invoices to the expense report.
It takes 2 minutes. Lets see if AI can give me those valuable 2 minutes back.
So I bought something, screenshotted the invoice, and fed it to perplexity with this bare minimum prompt:
“can you add this to the expense report in notion”
Then I pressed enter, laid back and waited.
The browser thought for a second… and then it opened a magic window.
And just like the worst magician on earth, it started telling me everything it was doing in excruciating detail.
“Opening Notion. Looking for the expense report. Okay, I found the expense report. Clicking on the expense report to go in there. Okay I’m at the expense report. I see a lot of previous expenses. Let me make a new page.”
I was in awe at that point.
I’ve heard of AI being able to do something like this (and fail). Seeing it happen live was a whole different beast.
And so I watched (for 5 minutes) as the AI did everything.
Now did it do it well?
For the amount of context given. Yes.
Granted, I had to manually add some missing info. But for how little instruction it got, it was amazing.
I started daydreaming after this single experience.
Hours of grunt work REPLACED by a simple prompt. Every annoying thing outsourced to a $20/month “employee”.
It would be GLORIOUS.
Now it’s time for a REAL test.
I remembered that I’m behind on playlist building.
Perplexity tells me that it can search and add songs to my Sloptify playlists.
This is HUGE. This takes a long time because of all the back and forth and monotonous clicking of the same 3 buttons..
If this can even save me 5 seconds of doing it, I will submit to the AI overlords and build a Sam Altman shrine.
So I cook up the most detailed and powerful prompt yet:
“Hey, can you scrape my website and add songs from the emails to my Spotify playlist? here’s the website [website link]”
(You may be seeing a pattern here)
“Sure thing! Let me get started.” Said my new best friend.
And so the magic window opened again…
It thought for a second…
And it went to my Zoho.
(The email inbox I use for this newsletter)
“Hmmmmm. I can’t find any songs here. Let me try again…. Hmmmmm… I can’t find any songs here, let me try a different folder…” My now SCHIZOFRENIC friend said.
I… see…
Surely, it was my fault for giving it such a low context prompt. How silly of me to not spend 20 minutes writing a harry potter chapter of a prompt.
But I was determined to “Save some time” on my playlist building.
So I wrote the mega prompt.
And after a good 10 minutes, it was ready. Surely it couldn’t mess this up.
Right?
“Alright, lets [big prompt here]”
“Sure thing. Let me get started”
It opened the big screen again… and went to the right website!
And then it started actually collecting the songs.
Snails pace of course. It just HAD to tell me what it was doing. Still cool to see.
It had to go through 50 pages so I left my desk to let my new “employee” work.
20 minutes later I come back to check on my friend.
And notice that it finished!
So with excitement I go check the Sloptify playlist and….
Find that it only moved 5 out of the 100 songs it was supposed to do.
Okay. Maybe that was a bit TOO ambitious.
Credit where it’s due, it’s crazy how it managed to do that whole process for 5 songs.
So I gave it an easier but similar task.
I sent it a screenshot of my YouTube history that had around 10 songs and asked it to add it to a Sloptify playlist.
Should be an easy task… right?
I mean it already did 5. This is half the effort since it’s only extracting text from a screenshot and taking it to Sloptify.
Well, lets see what my friend decided to do on its magic screen.
“Okay! I have extracted the song titles from the screenshot. Opening spotify. Looking up song #1. Song #1 found! Clicking add to playlist.
Looking up song #2. Song #2 found! Clicking add to playlist.
Looking up song #3. Found something with the song name but it doens’t have [THE YOUTUBE CHANNEL NAME]. looking for the song. I found something similar to the song name but it’s not hte song. Searching again. I found something similar to the song name but its not thr song. Sear-
Sorry. I can’t help you with this task, here’s all the names of the songs. You can copy and paste it into search and add them yourself. Let me know if you need more help.”
Great. So uh.
Wha?
Yeah yeah I COULD have been more specific, more clear, and also given it a back rub.
BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT THE BILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES ARE PROMISING.
Hell, the average person spends 2-5 minutes making a prompt.
And it’s usually something stupid like “Should I pay the credit card in full?” (Real prompt I read.)
So far AI has been like this new toy that breaks after 20 uses.
I heard this description 5 years ago at a seminar “AI is the worlds smartest 5 year old assistant. It will do what you ask it to very fast and sometimes effectively. But at the end of the day you gotta guide it.”
And honestly? Aside from grunt work (that still needs so much instructions its faster to do it yourself) this is very underwhelming.
Now is AI useful? Yes. I’m sure it’s helpful in research and math industries. It’s also a really good teacher if you check your sources after.
But for day to day operations? To do things that require attention? It still needs some improvement.
Regardless, I invite you to give it a shot. If you have a better result let me know.
As for today’s song. Here’s an AI generated track.
Nah just kidding.
The day that happens is the day I’ve been found by the authorities and forced to activate the hyperrealistic AI version of my online persona as a way to make those around me believe I am alive and well.
What were we talking about?
Oh right. The daily song.
This is something different from kurt aka. This dude has the musical output of an AI model but given his long track record is seriously doubt it is.
I mean seriously, he has like 5 aliases and each one of them does a different thing.
There’s a big flume inspiration in his tracks as well so you know bro lives and breathes the DAW.
And now. Let’s see if my good friend can find us the links for today’s song.
Alright these are the links it brought back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VSjXVBK4xM
BUT GUESS WHAT. NONE OF THOSE MF LINKS WORK.
So here I go finding the right ones. (AI truly is the future, huh.)
Njoy.
Genre: Has a beautiful melody in the middle.
Always hoping that AI gets better or busts Forward
Hz
P.S. I do recommend using AI for the standard stuff. I will recommend perplexity as a search engine since it always finds sources and explains everything pretty well.
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