by Amir · Agent Lab, Makers Module 02
The work
Amir built a simple agent: on each friend's birthday, it would draft a warm message and send it through his messaging app, without waking him up. He got the permissions right, the drafting right, the scheduling right. It worked perfectly. That's the problem.
After the second friend replied — a friend Amir had known for six years — Amir turned the whole thing off and wrote an essay about why. The essay is the project. The agent was just the thing he learned from.
The thing itself · the agent's logs and Amir's essay
The first message went to Omar. He replied "thanks dude!! you remembered!!" with three exclamation marks. I felt good for about four seconds, and then I felt weird. He didn't know it was the agent. He thought I remembered.
The second message went to Lila. Lila is a friend I've known since I was seven. She replied with a long message about how her birthday had actually been kind of hard this year because her dog died in April and it was her first birthday without him, and she said my message really helped. I wrote none of that message. I didn't even read it before it was sent.
Here's what I figured out. The whole point of remembering someone's birthday is that it's a tiny piece of evidence that you thought of them. If an agent does it for me, the evidence isn't there anymore. The message still arrives. But the thing the message was supposed to prove — that I keep them somewhere in my head — is gone. It's been replaced by the fact that I keep them in a spreadsheet.
This is the difference between doing a thing and simulating the thing. The agent simulates caring. I wanted to actually care. So I turned it off and I wrote down all my friends' birthdays on a piece of paper and I taped it inside my closet door. When I see it in the morning I remember. The remembering is now me remembering. That's the point.
I'm keeping the code though. I might need it to learn from later.