Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

geoffreylitt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 183 posts

Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

#11

Post by dkdcwashere »

mbil wrote: post #6
dogline wrote: post #4

This made me think: what if my little utility assistant program that I have, similar to your Stevens, had access to a mailbox? I've got a little utility program that I can tell to get the weather or run common commands unique to my system. It's handy, and I can even cron it to run things regularly, if I'd like. If it had its own email box, I can send it information, it could use AI to parse that info, and possibly se…

I’ve been thinking lately that email is a good interface for certain modes of AI assistant interaction, namely “research” tasks that are asynchronous and take a relatively long time. Email is universal, asynchronous, uses open standards, supports structured metadata, etc.

yep went down a rabbit hole trying to build a company around this. it’s the perfect UI

text + attachments into the system, text + attachments out

Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

#12

Post by returntooffice »

dogline wrote: post #4

This made me think: what if my little utility assistant program that I have, similar to your Stevens, had access to a mailbox? I've got a little utility program that I can tell to get the weather or run common commands unique to my system. It's handy, and I can even cron it to run things regularly, if I'd like. If it had its own email box, I can send it information, it could use AI to parse that info, and possibly se…

[flagged]

Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

#14

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Hmm, there's supposed to be a Tasks [reminders] feature in ChatGPT, but it's in beta (I don't have access to it). Whenever it gets released, you could make some kind of "router" that connects to different communication methods and connect that up to ChatGPT statefully, and you could just "speak"/type to ChatGPT from anywhere, and it would send you reminders. No need for all the extra logic, cron jobs, or SQLite table (ChatGPT has memory across chats).

Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

#15

Post by theptip »

This is fun! I think this sort of tooling is going to be very fertile ground for hackers over the next few years.

Large swathes of the stack is commoditized OSS plumbing, and hosted inference is already cheap and easy.

There are obvious security issues with plugging an agent into your email and calendar, but I think many will find it preferable to control the whole stack rather than ceding control to Apple or Google.

Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

#17

Post by Workaccount2 »

Lately I have been experimenting with ways to work around the "context token sweet spot" of This works really effectively with thinking models, because the thinking eats up tons of context, but also produces very good "summary documents". So you can kind of reap the rewards of thinking without having to sacrifice that juicy sub 50k context. The database also provides a form of fallback, or RAG I suppose, for situations where the summary leaves out important details, but the model must also recognize this and go pull context from the DB.

Right now I have been trying it to make essentially an inventory management/BOM optimization agent for a database of ~10k distinct parts/materials.

Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

#18

Post by cess11 »

criddell wrote: post #8
mbil wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been thinking lately that email is a good interface for certain modes of AI assistant interaction, namely “research” tasks that are asynchronous and take a relatively long time. Email is universal, asynchronous, uses open standards, supports structured metadata, etc.

How does email support structured metadata? Are you talking about X headers?

Maybe they're thinking of XML.

Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

#20

Post by [deleted] »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #17

Lately I have been experimenting with ways to work around the "context token sweet spot" of This works really effectively with thinking models, because the thinking eats up tons of context, but also produces very good "summary documents". So you can kind of reap the rewards of thinking without having to sacrifice that juicy sub 50k context. The database also provides a form of fallback, or RAG I suppose, for situatio…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN