Fig’s first message offered three things it could take off my plate. I’d already done all three.
Fig
I named my OpenAI assistant Fig. I also have Grok Bot running, though I’m still figuring out what to do with it.
I asked both the obvious question: what can you do for me?
Both wanted access. Connect your email. Connect your calendar. Fig suggested adding Slack and Notion too.
Apparently we needed more material.
In July, I wrote that AI should notice first. I wanted it to catch the thing I hadn’t thought to ask about. Now I have assistants trying to do that. Fig’s opening suggestions gave me another job: explaining which work was already done.
Grok Bot followed up by email with four suggested roles: Chief of Staff, Inbox Manager, Daily Briefing Writer, and Presentation Designer.
Take the first one. A good chief of staff learns how you operate. Eventually, you trust them to handle a conversation you can’t be in and make a call you’ll stand behind. They become your proxy. That takes time, including time spent finding out where you disagree.
Grok Bot’s version “scans Slack, email, calendar, and meeting notes and delivers a succinct readout.” Useful, potentially. I’d still have the readout to read and the decisions to make.
I asked what it could do for my life. It sent me an org chart.
The most useful thing Fig has done for me so far came from my existing to-do list: getting my tax documents and company books in order. It gathered documents and invoices from a pile of websites and helped reconcile the books in QuickBooks. I did the filing myself.
The connectors helped a little. My laptop did the heavy lifting. I logged into the sites, and Fig drove the browser, clicking through the pages and collecting the files the way I would have. An AI assistant was downloading PDFs for me. I was very happy with this arrangement.
Most of those sites have no way for software to talk to them directly. So the newest kind of assistant did its best work in the same web pages we’ve clicked through for twenty years.
I approved steps along the way and checked the work afterward. It made mistakes. It counted my credit card’s cash back as income. It isn’t. Staying involved took time. By my estimate, work that could have eaten several days took a few hours.
Not bad for a fig.
When I onboarded new engineers at Apple, we started with a laptop, NDAs, accounts, and access. Then came a tiny task, just a toe in the water. Change a string, a bit of text in the app. Build it. See the change show up. It proved they could compile and run the project. It showed them how the work flowed, and showed me how they thought. We could both see whether it had landed.
Nobody’s first ticket is Chief of Staff.
I think about that every time an assistant asks me to connect everything. We’ve done the accounts step. We still need a first task we can finish together.
The tax work gave us one. I knew what I wanted collected. I could check whether it had arrived. When Fig needed me to log in or approve a step, I knew why it had stopped. That made the supervision tolerable. I was helping a job move toward an ending I understood. I’ll do that for a few hours if it clears work I’d otherwise be doing myself.
The first task is how you learn each other.
With “help me manage my life,” I’m still responsible for inventing the job, deciding whether the assistant can do it, and working out how to check it. That’s quite a bit of management to take on when you were hoping for an assistant.
The iPhone never asked me to do that. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced it as “an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator.” Three jobs people already had. The App Store came the next summer. Apple chose the first jobs. Everything else could wait.
There’s another thing I’m working out: which jobs I want it to have. Travel keeps coming up as the example, as if planning a fun vacation were the biggest pain in the ass in anyone’s week. Fig has offered to compare travel options for my family.
I like planning travel. Even when the clicking gets tedious, I’m picturing where we’ll stay and what we’ll do. For a while, I get to think about being there. I’d lose something if I handed that over and got an itinerary back.
A 2010 study of 1,530 Dutch adults found that people with a holiday coming up reported higher happiness than those without one. The authors suggested anticipation as a possible explanation. After the trip, most were no happier than the people who stayed home. That fits my experience. I start enjoying the trip before we’ve gone anywhere.
Anthropic’s Claude Duet announcement this week says personal errands such as booking tickets “aren’t quite as strong” yet. Fine by me; take your time.
I’d happily give an assistant the receipts afterward. I’ve never looked forward to reconciling a hotel bill.
Receipts, invoices, forms. Call it the internet’s laundry: nobody enjoys it, and it never stops coming.
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
Meetings make this question more awkward. I’d love to send an assistant to some of mine. I can picture the digital twins trading updates while the people get on with their day. I’d also have to decide what sending mine says to the person who bothered to show up. Sometimes they need information I could have sent ahead. Sometimes they need me to hear them out, or take responsibility for a decision.
Some work is the output. Some work is showing up.
For now, Fig has earned another job. I’m looking for more internet laundry.
The actual laundry is coming too. You can already preorder a home robot designed to help with the laundry, for $20,000. First the assistants used connectors. Then they borrowed my mouse. Next, they get hands.
What’s the most boring thing you’d hand off tomorrow?
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