How a Tiny AI Agent Gave Me My Attention Back
Every time I opened my Downloads folder, a small part of my mind died. Not dramatically—more like a slow leak. The cognitive overhead of disorder.
The Tiny Agent
So I built a tiny agent. Not a fancy one. Just smart enough to watch new files, understand what they are, and put them where they belong. Screenshots go to Screenshots. PDFs get sorted by topic. Old files get archived after 30 days.
The Liberation
The first week felt strange. I kept opening folders expecting chaos. Instead: order. Not perfect order—the agent makes mistakes—but good enough order. The kind of order that doesn't require my attention.
That's when I understood what I had actually built.
The Lesson
AI does not need to do impressive things to be valuable. It needs to do annoying things reliably.
The most powerful AI applications will not be the ones that write novels or generate art. They will be the ones that handle the thousand small frictions that drain us without us noticing.
This is the real promise of AI for everyday life. Not replacement. Not augmentation. Reclamation.
We leak attention constantly—to notifications, to cluttered folders, to the hundred small maintenance tasks that nobody cares about but everybody must do. Each one is trivial. Together, they are a constant tax on our capacity to think clearly.
The tiny agent taught me that the most valuable AI is often the one you forget exists. It runs in the background, handling what you shouldn't have to think about, so you can think about what matters.
