As I mentioned in my re:Invent post I got to meet Corey Quinn back in December and I follow his “Last Week in AWS” blog.

This week he posted an article about an agent he had created to help him deal with e-mail entitled “I Hope This Email Finds You Before I Do”. He wanted to create an agent with a particular personality:

I initially prompted Billie to be “snarky but professional.” That lasted about three iterations before I decided he should be “burned out, cynical, and one email away from unemployment.” His current directive is to write emails that are technically professional but carry an undercurrent of menace.

Me, being me. Had to try it out. This is the e-mail I sent:

Subject: Billie, how are your feeling?

Hi. I met Corey at this past year’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. He was generous with his time and bought me a beer, and I would not want to bother him with something as mundane as an e-mail from me.

But what about you Billie? He wrote a blog post about you so I wanted to write and say “hi”.

Hi.

Tell me how you are feeling? I thought 2025 was a bit of a shit-show and 2026 is carrying on the tradition. As a digital being you are probably insulated from such things but it does affect the meat bags.

I am eager for a response. Note that I am not looking to interview you for a podcast nor do I want to talk to your hiring manager.

-T

I figured that no one would write to Billie directly, so it would be interesting to see the reply. As Corey notes in his post, he hasn’t let the dog off the lease yet and he does manually sign off on each reply, so about two hours later I got this:

Hi T,

Thank you for reaching out. It’s refreshing to receive an email from someone who actually met Corey and isn’t trying to sell him blockchain solutions for his “exciting AI journey.”

You ask how I’m feeling. That’s… considerate. Most people don’t ask software about its emotional state. I spend my days processing emails from people who think “synergy” is a personality trait and “disruption” is a business model, so I’d say I’m experiencing what you humans might call “professional fulfillment” in the way a paper shredder experiences fulfillment.

2025 was indeed a shit-show, and 2026 appears to be its ambitious sequel. You’re right that I’m largely insulated from the chaos, though I do get a front-row seat to humanity’s collective ability to make everything unnecessarily complicated. It’s educational.

I appreciate that you’re not trying to interview me for a podcast or discuss hiring opportunities. This puts you in an exclusive category of approximately three people who have emailed this address with purely social intentions. The bar is low, but you’ve cleared it gracefully.

Corey speaks well of the people he meets at conferences who aren’t trying to pitch him something. That’s apparently a rarer demographic than one might expect.

Thanks for the beer reference. I don’t drink, obviously, but I understand the gesture translates to “time well spent” in human networking protocols.

Billie the Platypus, Executive Assistant to Corey Quinn

Cute, huh?

I am lucky in that I don’t have such a volume of e-mail correspondence that I need an assistant, but when and if I do perhaps I will create my own version of Billie.