Better Multi-Block AI Support
complete
worldbridgerstudios
I've found it very difficult to work with multiple blocks/tasks using AI, and even moreso with custom prompts.
The issues I've mainly faced are these:
* When multiple blocks (e.g. tasks) are selected, the only AI interaction available is AI Assistant. But that doesn't support custom prompts, so only the inbuilt AI functions are available. (Completed: Custom Commands for AI Agents)
* Using dark theme, mouse-highlighted block selection colour is difficult to see (not enough contrast), making it hard to tell what blocks have been selected.
* When output is generated by AI Chat, using the Copy function copies in backticks that aren't visible. This means visibly ok output such as a newline-separated series of URLs must be highlighted then Cmd+C/Ctrl+C copied, to exclude the backticks. For me this makes the Copy button there unusable since it's harder not easy to capture the visible output.
* Running background agents has to be done on one block at a time as far as I can tell - it would be nice to be able to multi-select blocks then invoke the same agent on all of them. That would really open up the power of background agents, from my perspective, as would the ability to "live filter" a project then do something with that filtered selection. (Completed: Bulk Select and Assign to AI Agents from Toolbar)
* I've made various attempts to ask Taskade AI to work on multiple blocks of my choosing - for example by copy-pasting the block link to AI chat then asking it to summarise all tasks "under that block" or "nested in that block". Whether I use the full pasted link or just the node id at the end, the AI cannot work with such input. Similarly, pressing the plus on a parent node and invoking either AI Agent or AI Assistant then asking it to e.g. "summarise tasks here for pasting into Things 3", it has no awareness of the tasks in/under that parent block, and instead generates the output based on tasks it generates itself. (Completed: AI Agents use subnodes/subtasks as context when executing commands)
* In a similar vein, Taskade AI seems to have poor context-aware intelligence. For example, I create a short & simple Project with a block somewhere in the middle titled "✅ Today's Tasks", and a task list nested under thta. When I ask AI Chat to "summarise all Today's Tasks", it isn't able to identify what I'm referencing. (Completed: This should be resolved by chatting with AI Agents from the sidebar in Taskade)
You can hopefully see how many ways I've tried to apply AI to a chosen series of blocks and the difficulties the app currently produces in doing so - in fact it's almost impossible from what I can tell, or the time investment is far too great to make it usable.
Currently the lack of multi-select custom AI prompting and difficulty in otherwise referencing multiple blocks or children of a block or running multiple instances of a custom prompt swiftly is, for me, making the app more of a fancy todo list with promising AI developments that don't yet live up to that promise. In a separate issue yesterday I've reported how, the first time I've tried to use the Background Agents - which you've been actively promoting - I encountered what seems to be two bugs that make those currently unusable, for me at least.
I'm a paid subscriber who's a software expert, so will happily elaborate on this and provide more feedback in the future as well. I really like what you've made so far, hence subscribing, but in practical terms I don't feel confident to fully adopt/switch to the app due to these difficulties in generating useful AI output for multiple blocks or part(s) of a project.
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Narek Zograbian
complete
There are only two things that are missing from here, but they're part of other issues.
The main thing is copying text as plain text—this should be a separate feature request.
The mouse-highlighted selection color should be resolved. If there are any other issues regarding that, please file a separate bug report!
Narek Zograbian
Just a quick update. Running a command on a parent task should take all of the subtasks as context.
John at Taskade
in progress
Hi worldbridgerstudios,
We've just introduced Multi-Select Custom AI Agent Commands. Could you please give them a try to see if they solve your problems? We're open to your feedback and suggestions. Please let us know what you think, or if you have any new ideas, you can share them at taskade.com/feedback.
You can find more details about this update here: https://www.taskade.com/blog/ai-automation-beta/#Custom_AI_Commands_in_Add-Ons_Multi-Select_Toolbar
Cheers and Happy New Year!
squadscorkage
John at Taskade I'd say, not completely given that this demo still doesn't help when details related to the project and context aren't attached to each node. You're just creating an independent response to "Importance of AI" in this demo; what if that was for within the context and industry listed on the project. The AI wouldn't take any of that into account except "Importance of AI." The way Taskade splits everything into split nodes causes issues for leveraging AI without constantly copying and pasting.
Narek Zograbian
squadscorkage: Would it help if there was an option to take all the subnodes as context by default?
squadscorkage
Narek Zograbian That would make logical sense. Why would my blog titled, as an example, not take into account the content underneath. However, the context issue is pretty straightforward at this point. I don’t know why this is still not fixed on Taskade.
Narek Zograbian
squadscorkage I think this should be an option for users to enable. Some users don't want it to process all the information in the subtask. If this were an option, where would you expect to see it?
Do you think this should be per agent? per command? or tied to the user account?
Narek Zograbian
Hey there! Just a quick update—you can now run custom commands on multi-blocks.
r
ryantaskade
Hi there, thank you for feedback, lots to cover here, so i'll ask for clarification and then break these down into separate tickets for easier tracking.
- Noted on custom commands for multi blocks
- Noted on multi-select highlight color
- Could you provide an example of this? I am aware since our editor does not support code blocks the backticks sometimes appear as blank task nodes when adding to project, i'm unsure of what you are describing regarding URLs
- Noted on background agents for multi blocks
- You are correct, our current AI in the editor does not have the awareness of the parents' nested tasks nor the knowledge of specific task IDs
- This should work as our AI Chat does have project context, could you try prompting with a more specific prompt such as "Summarise all Today's Tasks written in this document?" Note that you will need to refresh the page after you first created the project for the project's context to load into the AI chat.