I Found Myself Encouraging an AI Agent
"You're doing great. Keep going."
I said this to Perplexity's Comet Assistant. Multiple times.
I was desperate. Worried it would give up.
The Task
I had 100+ credit card statement emails sitting in my inbox. Going back to 2014. I needed them for something I was building. Getting to each statement meant opening an email, scrolling down, downloading the PDF. Repeat 100+ times.
Drone work. Boring. Soul sucking.
They would have comfortably sat in my email for another decade.
I had seen a tweet about Comet Assistant finding a specific LinkedIn post and replying to it. If it could do that, could it handle 100+ emails?
How It Went
I was in Perplexity Comet. Logged into my email. I prompted the assistant to search for all emails with a specific subject, open each email, scroll to the bottom, download the attached file. And then repeat till it completed all the emails.
The assistant had questions.
How many emails? I said 100+.
It offered helpful suggestions that basically meant I'd still be doing the work myself. I said we have all the time in the world.
Just do it.
Funny how that works with AI agents. Tell them you're not in a hurry, and they stop objecting.
So it started. Open email. Scroll down. Download file.
Repeat.
An hour later I checked back. Internet had disconnected. And it had stopped at hardly a few files done.
So I had to prompt it to resume anytime it got disrupted. That seemed to do the trick.
Got disconnected again. Lost progress. Reconnected again. Started again where it left off.
I kept checking in a few times:
"Are you okay? Keep going. You're doing well."
It played along with polite responses, humouring the human.
The internet kept disconnecting. The assistant kept resuming.
Final result:
- 119 emails opened
- 119 files downloaded
- Spanning 2014 to 2025
Task completed. It took Comet Assistant close to 3 hours for the entire process, internet issues and all.
Three hours to download 119 files. That sounds inefficient. But here's what actually happened in those three hours:
I took a long walk. Cooked a meal. Had dinner. Made calls. Watched TV.
The AI agent did the anti-life work, so I could go and live my life. And I got to stay human. The 119 files got downloaded. I didn't lose three hours of my life to drone work.
I'll take that trade every time.