i’ve been building my own ai assistant on and off for a month now.

right now, like 90% of everything is ai-generated code.
another 9% is me refactoring or cleaning up that code.
maybe 1% is handwritten by me.

some stuff is probably faster to just do by hand, but having an ai bang it all out at typing speed is just awesome.

Tony Stark and JARVIS

learning and applying random knowledge is super easy with ai these days.
you really don’t need to be a pro at any specific software—just understanding the basics of good software is enough.
honestly, you can get away with not knowing some things, because the ai usually overdelivers when you prompt it. the key is just having a sense of what you know vs. what you don’t.

what it can do

  • gmail: reads and writes my emails (could be risky if i’m not careful 🙃)
  • calendar: creates google calendar events for me—i just say stuff like “next week monday, tuesday, and saturday from 14:30 to 00:15” and it adds them all.
  • todo app: hooks into things for adding and editing tasks the lazy way (by talking).
  • cover letter generator: throw it a job ad and it whips up a print ready cover letter in google docs, using my own style, past references, cv, etc.
  • personal finances: tracks and updates my finances with its own little database.
  • transaction tracking: i send a receipt photo and it parses out items and the payment total.

next up

  • actually link the apps together for “real” integration, not just doing tasks separately. maybe start with automating something like tax declaration.
  • scan my inbox for important mails and actually handle follow-up: schedule invoices, catch errors, handle small admin tasks, ask for clarifications, etc.

the goal

  • deal with invoices and boring, repeating stuff like bills and renewals.
  • make reminders smarter (right now they’re pretty basic).

the stack

  • node server running on a raspberry pi
  • connects to openai api
  • uses google docs + calendar apis

privacy notes

  • uses telegram api, openai api, so there are obviously privacy risks to consider. but openai probably has all my data so whatever