I think the last time that I stared at my screen, my mouse-pointer surrounded by tens of tabs all at once, was somewhere in the early 2000s when I downloaded a virus after installing something I should not have, prolly after having visited a site where I should not have been in the first place.
That was, until now.
Because last week, Perplexity farted out a little demon called Comet, which basically hijacks your browser for it to do things for you on your behalf.
I don’t mean no “suggest” things – like most assistants do (including my own “Jarvis” Martin.AI), I mean full-on clickity-click, typeity-type, shoppity-shop, maily-maily, and even scheduling my sad social life. I managed to get my ass in early, like I’m a TikTokker standing in line sniffing a new bag, and right after I got my hands on it, I ran about ten vicious tests and I must admit that it left my self-confidence in tatters.
I am here to tell you that this is the most disturbingly competent tool I’ve ever let loose on my screen. And I don’t usually say these things lightly, as you y’all know.
Let’s wander through the self-destruction of my dignity if you want. . . step-by-traumatizing-step.
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You have no excuses for not getting shit done
Look, most AI “tools” that I have had the ‘pleasure’ of playing with, are basically what you get when you Texas Instruments fx-83 had a love child with Microsoft’s Clippy from, um, 1998. They spew a lotta words, they can maybe do some calculating, and then they quietly wait for the sweet release of Ctrl+W*. But this thing from the bowels of Perplexity, boy-oh-boy, this mutant isn’t waiting for you to give it a command.
No, it is seeing.
It is acting.
It is understanding what you want, and it is actually DOING something like it is the world’s cheapest PA with none of the social skills you did not care for anyway.
It can compare prices on the crap you usually go shopping for online, it can fight off the inbox hydra, of course it can do some “researching” (read: Wikipedia and some Google-ing), it schedules existentially meaningless calls, and it does the doom scrolling as well.
All on your behalf.
Now take something that actually handles all-o-that that mess while you focus on pretending to be important, like you always wanted, and now you’re finally getting it!
I watched this lil’ freak run three sites at once, hunt deals like a bloodhound on meth, bang out emails for me, and slap appointments into my calendar.
But the thing was, that this wasn’t all that new to me.
So I set out to actually break the Comet.
I mean, really break it.
Test it to it’s limits, and then beyond.
Easy stuff, hard stuff, booby-traps, Kafkaesque tasks, and things that I wouldn’t even wish on my ex.
So, here’s what I did to it, with no Vaseline:
Test 1: Inbox from Hell
Mission: “Unsubscribe my inbox from all the spam and newsletter vomit I’ve ignored for a month.”
What I saw: Comet went into my Gmail and Outlook web, where it sniffed out promo crap, and hammered the unsubscribe links, and the coolest trick of ‘m all was that it opened Sanebox (my AI inbox sanitizer), and ticked all the “Yes, I want less of this garbage” boxes to train the damn thing.
Two minutes. That’s what it took.
The only thing faster is my motivation to ignore my family. My inbox went from a total landfill to, um, kinda livable.
Miracle.
Saved 20 minutes of brain death and didn’t have to throw my laptop out of the window.
Test 2: Herding my dysfunctional so-called friends
Mission: “Organize dinner with Frank, Peter, and Alex this Saturday, 6pm, decent place (better than my backyard), and herd these cats properly”.
Result: Comet did NOT send a sad group mail. Nah. It stalked restaurants, and it fired off emails with options, and it sets up backup plans (like anyone would ever read them), it included calendar invites, and it even built a group Google Doc. Normally this planning cycle turns into a spree of WhatsApp messages, a broken friendship, and someone eating alone, but now it was done in under five.
Still nobody replied, but hey, at least it tried.
Test 3: Shopping with a conscious
Mission: “Find me the cheapest audio mixer across Amazon, Bol, Cool Blue, and factor in all the sneaky ‘shipping’ and ‘taxes’”.
Outcome: Comet ripped all three sites right open, it grabbed the exact model, it did the math on all the fees, and slapped it into a comparison table with some links so even my Weiner could buy it.
Four minutes.
No more calculator, no more second-guessing, just pure shopping and dopamine hits for me from now on.
Test 4: Recipe Russian roulette
Mission: “Find a dinner recipe, don’t care if it’s healthy or not, only that it’s 15 minutes max, and nothing weird that’ll make me Google ‘What the hell is Casu Marzu**’”.
So Comet set out and found a bunch, filtered out anything that smelled like cheese, and kale, checked if I’d need to sell a kidney to buy the ingredients, and it even suggested a few replacements. Oh, and it broke down nutrition stats too. This thing is a godsent for Gordon Ramsay, minus the screaming.
****** Casu Marzu: Sardinian cheese that get’s it’s flavor from the fact it’s literally infested with live maggots (Marzu is prolly Sardinian for Maggots I’m guessing). People sometimes die from it. Not a typo. Moving cheese.
Test 5: Book shopping
Mission: “Give me the top 5 trending AI-horror books and find where I can get them cheapest, audio included cause I’m getting cross-eyed from sitting behind a screen all day”.
Comet coughed up current bestsellers, and it started price-hunting across stores, did physical/ebook/audio comparisons, and it even made me a shopping guide for dummies, links ‘n all.
Six minutes.
Amazon is now convinced I’m a productivity guru with ADHD.
Test 6: Grocery cart heroin
Mission: “Find a Thai green curry recipe, then add every damn ingredient to my Picnic*** cart automatically”.
Comet finds a legit recipe, makes a full grocery list, opens my Picnic account, types in every unpronounceable ingredient, nails the right brand, right amount, right everything. Amma talking “Thai Kitchen green curry paste”, “365 Organic coconut milk”, “Fresh Thai basil”.
Next-level, man.
My fridge is now a Bangkok street market.
******* A service for lazy people like me, where we pay a person to buy me stuff. It isn’t in the DSM-V yet, but it should. And if you’re not acquainted with it. Great! You still have values.
Alternatives: Instacart, REWE, Ocado, Glovo, Collect&Go etc. etc.
Test 7: YouTube in a blender
Mission: “Go to my favorite techs channel and summarize the latest video about new gadgets”.
[Note: to be frank, this is the most boring challenge I could give it, but maybe you think it’s mind blowing. Not me. But at least you don’t come whining to me I left something out.]
Comet finds the video, digests it, spits out a summary with timestamps, and lists action points. I can pretend I watched the whole thing, look utterly cool in meetings, and waste zero time listening to tech-gurus who talk like they snorted their own supply.
Test 8: News scoops
Mission: “Find everything new about AI and IT-tech this week, leaks included”.
[Note: this one is particularly cool – for me at least – because it saves me an hour a day searching and swiping left.]
Comet pulled info from blogs, news sites, ArXiv, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, forums, you-name-it, and it lined it up in order, it took out anything relevant, and skipped the friggin’ clickbait.
This actually is the best one of the ten. Because just think about it. Now it may be news, but tomorrow, it may well be new freelance gigs, or projects or whatever kind of thing you want to lift from the internet.
Test 9: Elon’s ego hour of power
Mission: “Find the most recent interview with Noel Skum, Sam the Scam, Pitch-AI and Sad-AI-a-Nadella and extract business ‘wisdom’ and AI zingers for me to use in future blog posts”.
Comet went on to hunt down the latest podcast of those peeps, and chewed through hours of “This is the future”, and “AI is going to replace all of us” monologues, and spat out quotes and business tips, and organized them by topic as a good stenographer would. .
Test 10: Playing calendar contortionist
Now this is again something to play with, and to think about its possibilities for the future. . .
Mission: “Analyze my blog posts at: techtonicshifts.blog, and find two AI and tech conferences next month that are relevant for my content, add them to my calendar with every detail”.
Comet trawled for events, like it was trying to catch the last sardine in the ocean, and checked if they were actually useful, then plonked them into my with times, links, locations, and enough info for even the most hungover guy to get it.
End-to-end.
Coordination anxiety cured.
Social life still dead.
***** CTRL+W = exit – ya noob.
What did I learn, besides needing less therapy?
Ten tests, nine perfect.
The one that sucked, only failed because I wanted to have 10 tests instead of nine, so in the end I gave it an assignment with which it could only fail me.
But nonetheless the Comet tried, like a loyal but totally misunderstood Weiner dog.
But here’s the bit that people keep missing. . .
Lemme spell it our for you: This ain’t no dumb productivity trick.
This is a full-on shift in how humans smash their faces against the internet. This ain’t “work smarter” – it is “let the robot do all the shit while you take a nap”.
I tell ya – this takes so much time off my hands, I am even sleeping better at night.
Nah, not really, but you get my point.
Most people have no idea this stuff exists yet.
But now you do, and the ones who figure it out first will run circles around the digital cavemen still doing everything the slow way.
If you’re reading this (august ‘25), you are ahead of the flock.
The flaws I actually gave a damn about
Look, I’m not gonna blow smoke up your USB hatch. Comet ain’t perfect, and neither is your face. Here’s where it is still dumb as a brick:
- Some sites with annoying security just flip it the bird.
- When real human nuance is required, you kinda need to give it step-by-step instructions, like training a psychotic Chihuahua (man, these lil’ critters are true schizoids).
- You gotta spell out what you want, or you get the equivalent of a adolescent on a sugar rush.
- Some tools need you to authenticate once, so put down the tinfoil hat.
- For money stuff, keep an eye on things or end up a second time as a Nigerian prince victim
But know this, the tech is moving faster than my will to live, and by the time you finish reading this, it will already be twice as good, while you will still be figuring out the settings.
Industries that deserve to panic
Look, this was basically what I was talking about last week in the webinar (that took way too long for y’all).
The web is full of slop.
In 2024 about 57% of the internet was made by the AI. It is predicted that in 2026 that number will grow to 90%. And it is a fact that people hate slop. So people will perhaps make less use of the doomed internet. And once they get their sweaty little palms on tech like this, who is going read all the advertisements and click on ‘em? And once on a website, who are they going to cross-sell all the unwanted items to?
The bot?
The bot doesn’t give a damn. It just does what it is told.
So give it a year, and this tech will instigate a mass culling.
Now, who are it’s main victims:
- Online shops: AI will stalk your competitors, update your inventory, handle customer whining, and chat up your suppliers
- Real sstate vultures: Automated research, client nagging, analysis, and doc-pushing
- Marketing agencies: Competitor snooping, content theft, social spam, and reporting all on autopilot
- Suits and services: Research, onboarding, meetings, paper-pushing, and annoying follow-ups, now done by the robot
The companies plugging in AI first will bury the ones working with cheap labor, or the ones still hiring cheap interns.
End of story.
Now excuse me while I go teach Comet to do all my work for me. At least it has more processing power than most executives I’ve met.
Signing off,
Comet
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. It’s job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins.
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