Cue

Planning in an AI Age: Does it Exist?

What does a personal planning tool look like in the age of AI?

It’s very natural, with LLMs and agents, to wonder what will fade away, what stays the same, and what radically changes in the coming years.

Do we still need:

As a software engineer, it’s clear that agentic use of LLM’s can radically alter at least that kind of work. Maybe many others.

I’ve built Cue. I’m still building it. It’s a personal planning tool. Does it still need to exist? Why? Why not? Will it be different?

My answers to these questions are open and tentative. The fun thing about radically transformative technologies is that we get to learn, to experiment, and to figure out what works for us humans.

So here is the first of some tentative answers.

Does it still need to exist?

Yes. On the whole, humans cannot and will not abdicate responsibility for deciding what they will do with their lives, with their time. As throughout most of history, different people will take different levels of responsibility for choosing how to spend their time. Some will abdicate that responsibility. Others will have it taken from them by those with more power. We all allow some of that responsibility to be dictated by the institutions we join and the larger culture. But even within those constraints, humans choose.

New technologies expand the potential scope of those choices. They open up new possibilities. And they also eliminate or make obsolete other choices. True, we could still go out and hunt, but it’s not a realistic choice as the main source of your food, in the modern world. Because of technologies like agriculture.

On the flip side, it does appear as though a relatively mature, intelligent human will be able to have custom software built to solve their unique problems and work in ways they care about. They won’t need to hire engineers, but will just ask agents that it be made. While there will be guides and boundaries around that, people will have access to software automation and data analysis at a level that would boggle early engineers. And we are the early engineers. It will be as abundant as grocery store food is.

Choosing what to have built and how to use it will eventually be as fun as taking the time to figure out your ideal Thanksgiving dinner and then making it happen with shopping, baking, eating out, or combining some of those with your loved ones.

I’m excited for that new world. And so I think personal planning tools will still exist. We’ll be able to operate at higher levels of autonomy and abstraction - maybe like executives do today. And they are often those that benefit most from a good planning system, even while they’re able to delegate some parts of it to human assistants.

We’ll be able to do the same, delegating some aspects of our planning and time management to agents. But the core challenge of looking at the options before us and choosing what to spend our time on will always devolve to us, ultimately.

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