Is there some way to git clone this? It appears to use git under the hood but doesn't offer a publicly accessible interface.
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A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
61–70 of 183 posts
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#62This 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…
Mailgun (and I'm sure many other services like it) can accept emails and POST their content to an url of your choice. I use that for journaling: I made a little system that sends me an email every day; I respond to it and the response is then sent to a page that stores it into a db.
CloudMailin [0] is also great for parsing incoming email and doing stuff with it (ex. forward to a webhook / POST target, outbound capabilities, etc)
I've found it to be very reliable with a detailed dashboard to track individual transactions, plus they give you 10,000 emails a month for free.
Not an employee, just a big fan!
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#63Curious, how come you decided to use a cloud solution instead of hosting this on a home server? I’ve recently bought a mini PC for small projects like this and have been loving being able to host with no cost associated to it. Albeit it’s probably still incredibly cheap to use a IaaS or PaaS but still a barrier to entry for random projects I want to work on a weekend
> host with no cost associated to it
Home server AI is orders of magnitude more costly than heavily subsidized cloud based ones for this use case unless you run toy models that might hallucinate meetings.
edit: I now realize you're talking about the non-ai related functionality.
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#64This 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.
Email is decent for intermural communication. If it's intramural and you control both the sender and receiver, MQTT or ntfy are likely better communication channels since they increase flexibility and lower complexity, IMO.
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#65This 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…
This was the attack vector of a AI CTF hosted by Microsoft last year. I built an agent to assess, structure, and perform the attacks autonomously and found that even with some common guardrails in place the system was vulnerable to data exfiltration. My agent was able to successfully complete 18 of the challenges... Here is the write up after the finals.
https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2025/03/announcing-the-winne...
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#66I've been using my own telegram -> ai bot and its very interesting to see what others do with the similar interface.
I have not thought about adding memory log of all current things and feeding it into the context I'll try it out.
Mine is a simple stateless thing that captures messages, voice memos and creates task entries in my org mode file with actionable items. I only feed current date to the context.
Its pretty amusing to see how it sometimes adds a little bit of its own personality to simple tasks, for example if one of my tasks are phrased as a question it will often try to answer the question in the task description.
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#67This is probably naive and looking forward to a correction; isn't sending your info to Claude's API (or really any "AI API") is a violation of your safeguarded privacy data?
You could always run your own server locally if you have a decent gpu. Some of the smaller LLMs are getting pretty good.
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#68So… I have a number of questions: 1. How did he tell Claude to “update” based on the notebook entries? 2. Won’t he eventually ran out of context window? 3. Won’t this be expensive when using hosted solutions? For just personal hacking, why not simply use ollama + your favorite model? 4. If one were to build this locally, can Vector DB similarity search or a hybrid combined with fulltext search be used to achieve this…
> Won’t he eventually ran out of context window? The "memories" table has a date column which is used to record the data when the information is relevant. The prompt can then be fed just information for today and the next few days - which will always be tiny. It's possible to save "memories" that are always included in the prompt, but even those will add up to not a lot of tokens over time. > Won’t this be expensive…
Just want to say I appreciate your posts here on HN and on your blog about AI/LLMs.
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ages ago, I proposed that the best CMS for a company would be one which used e-mail as the front-end: - all attachments are stripped out and stored on a server in an hierarchical structure based on sender/recipient/subject line - all discussions are archived based on similar criteria, and can be reviewed EDIT: and edited like to a wiki
My one concern there would be edits: a CMS needs to support easily making edits to content (fixing typos etc) - editing existing posts via email sounds like it would be pretty fiddly.
The idea is content comes in via e-mail, stored in some sort of tagged structure, then edited like a wiki.
Re: A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
#70I'm a little confused as to the 16-bit game interface shown in the article. Is that just for illustration purposes in the article itself, or is there an actual UI you've built to represent Steven/Steven's world?