I Used to Deride AI Assistants. Then I Met a Stack of Business Cards.

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.

I used to deride the idea of an AI assistant from the moment they entered the picture after seeing all the different Claw variants . Why 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? I 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. If 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. That 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. It 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. This 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.