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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

then you dont deal in high enough email volume

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.

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

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

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?

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