Lab note 01: A good agent defaults to silence.

The first version of my personal agent was eager. Every new email, every calendar change, every reminder found its way to me. It was technically impressive and exhausting to live with.

So I flipped the default. Now nothing reaches me unless the agent can give a reason why it should, and why now. Most things are filtered out by simple rules before any model is asked anything at all: the time of day, what I’m doing, whether I’ve already dismissed something like it.

Two surprises came out of this.

First, silence is cheap. The rules that throw away most items cost almost nothing to run. The expensive thinking only happens for the few things that survive.

Second, it felt more intelligent, not less. Fewer interruptions, each one worth reading. That is exactly how a great human assistant feels.

The open question I’m still working on: how does the agent learn the difference between “not now” and “never”?