Some questions do not want a screen
Most of what you type comes back as one. A few things do not: what is slipping, what am I allowed to do here, why is this list empty, how do I add a column. Those come back as a sentence — with the rows behind it one click away.
No figure without a source
A grid that filtered on the wrong column at least shows you its rows. A fluent sentence carrying a total shows nothing, reads as authority, and is indistinguishable from the right answer until somebody re-does the sum. That is the failure this product treats as worse than no answer at all.
So a number cannot reach a sentence on its own. Every figure the assistant says arrives attached to the read it came from, and a sentence whose figure nothing accounts for is not said: you are given the rows instead. It is a property of how the sentence is built rather than a rule somebody has to remember.
- The table it was read off, and the rows behind it, one click away
- How many rows matched, and how many are drawn
- When they were read, to the minute
- Whose rights were applied — which is never left out
- At most three figures in one answer, because an answer is not a report
What it answers today
Written out rather than described, because the honest measure of an assistant is the list of sentences it actually recognises. Everything else goes to the ordinary prompt and comes back as a screen.
| What has gone quiet, in a sentence, with the rows beside it | |
| Your roles, and what they allow, read off the security model | |
| Whether it is the filter, the rights or the data — and which | |
| The sentence to type, which then produces a change you confirm |
What it will not do
An assistant is only worth having if the list of things it declines is as clear as the list of things it answers. These are not gaps waiting to be filled in a later release; each one is a decision.
- It never changes anything. Advice is not authority: “how do I add a column” comes back as the sentence to type, which produces a change you read and confirm, and never as the change itself.
- On tax or legal ground it gives you what your figures show and not what to file. A product that told a Belgian company what to submit would be practising a profession it is not qualified for.
- It says when it does not know, and which data would have answered the question.
- It does not claim to tell one kind of advice from another. Which register a sentence belongs to is a judgement about what you typed, and a judgement this product cannot make is one it does not announce.
- It reads only what you may read. There is no answer that quietly sees more than the person asking.
Ask it something on the first morning
The guided tour ends with exactly this: one question asked in words, answered in words, with its rows beside it. Seven days, five seats, demo data, no card.