{"slug": "i-used-to-deride-ai-assistants-then-i-met-a-stack-of-business-cards", "title": "I Used to Deride AI Assistants. Then I Met a Stack of Business Cards.", "summary": "A developer who previously dismissed AI assistants found a compelling use case after attending a business event. By using a coding agent to extract names and email addresses from a photo of business cards, then generating and sending personalized emails, the developer experienced the value of an AI assistant. The process felt like delegating to a real assistant, changing the developer's perspective on AI tools.", "body_md": "I used to deride the idea of an AI assistant from the moment they entered the picture (after seeing all the different *Claw variants).\n\nWhy would regular people like me need an assistant? The best use case I had heard was: \"Oh! It helps us decide whether I or my partner should drive the kids today!\" Solving that sounded like a silly problem for an AI assistant to handle. Again, I didn't know any better because I didn't have that problem. I thought I could handle one-off tasks with just an AI subscription. What else was there?\n\nI only found the answer once I had a specific use case for it. I attended a business event, talked to a dozen people, and collected several business cards. I wanted to send each person a personalized email thanking them and continuing our conversation.\n\nIf I were to do this manually, the process would look like this: open the email client, manually type in each email address from the business cards, ensure I typed everything correctly, compose my message, and again, make sure I didn't press \"send\" prematurely. Just thinking about it felt tedious.\n\nThat is when the idea of an assistant started making sense. I fire up my coding agent(not a *Claw still), I take a single photo of all the business cards together. I ask the it to extract the names and email addresses. Then, I ask it to loop through the list and ask me what I want to send to each person. It creates drafts(which I still manually review - can't trust them enough), I say send, and then it sends them all automatically.\n\nIt feels exactly like talking to a real assistant: you tell them what you want done, and it gets done without you having to press buttons or navigate a UI. That is exactly what I did; I simply gave it instructions using my voice.\n\nThis makes me feel that having an AI assistant is indeed helpful. It might have also been useful to jump on this a little sooner, as I could have bought that Mac Mini at the older, lower price.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-used-to-deride-ai-assistants-then-i-met-a-stack-of-business-cards", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/codisfy/i-used-to-deride-ai-assistants-then-i-met-a-stack-of-business-cards-592i", "published_at": "2026-07-19 00:18:39+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-19 00:57:24.736872+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "natural-language-processing", "developer-tools"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-used-to-deride-ai-assistants-then-i-met-a-stack-of-business-cards", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-used-to-deride-ai-assistants-then-i-met-a-stack-of-business-cards.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-used-to-deride-ai-assistants-then-i-met-a-stack-of-business-cards.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-used-to-deride-ai-assistants-then-i-met-a-stack-of-business-cards.jsonld"}}