In May 2025, I wrote a post called “I Don’t Want to Chat With You.”
The value of chatting is more apparent to me now than it was then.
I built a budget spreadsheet in a chat window. The goal of the sheet was to see how different budgeting scenarios would affect the business.
What came back was a workbook. The formulas were linked across cells. They were linked across books. I didn’t wire any of it.
I was able to spend actual time on the budget.
I know what this looked like before, because I did it. You asked the chat for a budget, and it spit out numbers. A table, sitting in the window. Then the work started. Copy. Paste. Link the cells yourself. Update things by hand every time a number moved.
I was using my brain twice. Once on the budget. Once on building a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet got most of it.
It was the same with a presentation for the team. It was the same with a doc. The chat answered, and I moved the answer to where the work was.
In that post, I said the conversation was the problem. I called it context switching. I said it was slower than doing the thing directly.
I had it wrong. The conversation was fine. The copy-and-paste was the problem. I was the software.
What changed is what comes back. The chat has the connectors now. It has the context before I type. It makes the deck. It makes the workbook. I don’t leave with a paragraph and a job to do.
I could focus on the reason I was building the sheet.
The reason didn’t change while I worked. I got to it faster. That is all that happened, and it is most of what I wanted in 2025.
I haven’t changed my mind about everything. Two months ago I wrote that a chat box is not a user experience. I still think that. Both can be true.
The budget was my question. Nobody else could have asked it. I showed up knowing what I wanted to know. A chat box is fine for that.
A lot of work doesn’t start with somebody’s question. Something breaks. A ticket comes in. The system already knows what should happen next. Making a person type first is still the friction I wrote about.
We still haven’t shipped a chat box at Kosmos. We’re building a workflow.
Chat works when I start the work. A workflow is for work that starts without me.