Your AI Assistant Is Waiting for a Question You Don't Have.

The pitch of the moment is appealing: connect your favorite AI to your email and messages, and just ask it anything. "What did my boss need?" "When's the dentist?" "Summarize the thread with the contractor." And to be clear — that's genuinely useful. I use it too.

But watch what actually happens in practice. Today's assistants are mainly reactive. They wait for you to bring them a problem, then go dig through your inbox to solve it. Which means all the hard work still lands on you: you have to know what to ask.

And that's the catch — you have to start with intent. You need the question before the assistant can help. Give it a vague prompt and you get a vague answer, or a volley of clarifying questions (which project? which Sarah? what time range?) until you've practically done the work yourself. Assistants are genuinely great when you can hand them a precise prompt and you already know who said what to whom. But think about when you actually need help. It's exactly when you're too busy to have read everything, too underwater to have thought through the implications, too behind to even know what happened. The moment you most need an assistant is the moment you're least equipped to prompt one well.

Here's the deeper problem, though — the one I keep coming back to. Often, what you actually need isn't the answer. It's the question. The most important thing in your messages this week might be something you'd never think to ask about — because you don't know it's there. Most assistants can only ever answer what you think to ask; it can't tell you about the thing you didn't know to look for. And knowing what to ask requires the one thing an on-demand tool doesn't have: a thorough, living understanding of you — your life, your priorities, what actually matters.

That's the difference between an assistant and a curator.

An assistant waits to be asked. A curator already knows what matters, watches everything, and surfaces the thing you needed before you knew to ask for it. One answers questions. The other makes sure you're asking the right ones. And when you're overwhelmed, the second is worth far more than the first.

That's what we're building Orbit to be — the curator. It keeps that continuous understanding of your life, organized into your orbits (major themes of your life), so the important thing reaches you whether or not you knew to go looking.

But here's the part I'm most excited about, and where this is all heading. Orbit isn't out to replace your favorite AI. I love these assistants; I'm not giving mine up. The long-term vision is the opposite: through MCP, plugins — whatever the connecting interface becomes — you'll plug Orbit into your assistant. So you keep asking it anything you want, exactly as you do today. Except now it isn't reasoning from a cold, blind search of your inbox — it's reasoning with a real model of your life underneath it. And Orbit can push the other way too: handing your assistant not just context, but the questions you should be asking yourself in the first place.

Answering questions is the easier part. Knowing which questions matter — that's the whole game. An assistant can do the first. It takes a curator to do the second.

And I'm grateful we get to build it. 🚀