Scaling Thoughts: Treating an LLM as Your Personal Secretary

Originally published on Zhihu Pin, 2025-06-17

A while ago at Sequoia's AI Ascent, I heard a perspective: "In the future, we will manage our own clusters of agents, making one-person companies possible, with productivity determined by the quantity and quality of the cluster." This made me stop and reflect: beyond writing code, how can LLMs actually optimize my life?

LLMs Are About More Than Just Code

There is no denying that the productivity boost LLMs bring to coding is phenomenal. What about outside of coding, though? I feel that the way LLMs disrupt productivity "should go beyond just code."

Based on my experience so far, aside from coding, I feel that most of the time an LLM is just a more efficient search engine. It reduces context switching across pages and aggregates knowledge directly, yet it is far from being "disruptive." Just as mentioned at the Sequoia event, there is still a huge vacuum between AI models and real user needs. We have to find a way to bridge it.

In my view, the current strength of an LLM does not lie in precise computation, but in acting as an "absolutely rational," tireless assistant with world-class knowledge. It can help you handle emails, plan schedules, and make preliminary decisions. On these "boring, tedious, and mechanical" tasks, as long as it is given enough context, I have no doubt at all that it can do the job faster and better than I can (at least in the case of Gemini).

The CEO Mindset

Mindset Shift

Could the real bottleneck of productivity be our limited attention? No matter how much information we have or how well it is summarized, there is a hard cap on the decisions and information we can process each day.

This inspired me to look at it differently: treat myself as a CEO, and treat the LLM as my secretary or execution team. A CEO does not micromanage everything, and instead excels at "delegating" (Delegate). Since an LLM cannot handle the most complex core tasks, I can hand over the trivial chores that drain my attention to it in a structured way.

Switching to the CEO mindset: which chores in your life are not worth spending your own mental energy on?

Personal Secretary Agent

That is why I am currently trying to build a personal secretary agent/workflow, with the goal of freeing myself from trivial tasks. By connecting various information sources and maintaining long-term memory, I want to turn the LLM into a personal hub for processing information.

Of course, the biggest obstacle right now is closed ecosystems (for example, data from apps like WeChat cannot be accessed smoothly). Even so, we can still proactively design personalized rules and notification methods so that AI integrates more seamlessly into our workflows.

Naval

"Set an aspirational hourly rate for your time, and calculate its value accordingly. If spending money saves you time that is worth more than the cost, spend the money without hesitation. To truly make money, you first have to believe that you are valuable."

This is not just a technical issue, it is a shift in mindset. Isn't delegating to AI somewhat similar to this?