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

geoffreylitt.com

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

#141

Post by baxtr »

dcre wrote: post #120
xp84 wrote: post #119

I don't know if I love this more for the sheer usefulness, or for the delightful over-the-top "Proper English Butler" diction. But what really has my attention is: Why is this something I'm reading about on this smart engineer's blog rather than an Apple or Google product release? The fact that even this small set of features is beyond the abilities of either of those two companies to ship -- even with caveats like "…

There’s actually a good answer to this, namely that narrowly targeting the needs of exactly one family allows you to develop software about 1000x faster. This is an argument in favor of personal software.

Isn’t that how good product development should look like for Apple/Gooogle though?

Find something useful for one family, see if more families find it useful as well. If so, scale to platform level.

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

#142

Post by const_cast »

lolinder wrote: post #128
xp84 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple walled garden argues against you here. There are at least 20 million families in America where this holds true: • Everyone in household uses an iPhone • Main adult family members use iCloud Mail or at least use Apple Mail to read other mail • Family members use iCloud contacts and calendars • USPS Informed Delivery could be used (available to most/all US addresses) • It can be ascertained what ZIP code you'…

Not every one of those families would find the same set of features helpful, so you have to make calls about what's worth developing and what isn't. Making those calls is very difficult because it's tricky to gather data about what will be used and appreciated.

Well, it's a good thing we've settled on... genmoji. Yeah.

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

#143

Post by aktuel »

xp84 wrote: post #119

I don't know if I love this more for the sheer usefulness, or for the delightful over-the-top "Proper English Butler" diction. But what really has my attention is: Why is this something I'm reading about on this smart engineer's blog rather than an Apple or Google product release? The fact that even this small set of features is beyond the abilities of either of those two companies to ship -- even with caveats like "…

The reason Google and Apple stopped innovating is simply because they make too much money from their current products and see every innovation primarily as a risk to their existing business. This is something that happens all the time to market leaders.

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

#144

Post by ymarketing »

baxtr wrote: post #141
dcre wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s actually a good answer to this, namely that narrowly targeting the needs of exactly one family allows you to develop software about 1000x faster. This is an argument in favor of personal software.

Isn’t that how good product development should look like for Apple/Gooogle though? Find something useful for one family, see if more families find it useful as well. If so, scale to platform level.

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

#145

Post by dzikimarian »

xp84 wrote: post #119

I don't know if I love this more for the sheer usefulness, or for the delightful over-the-top "Proper English Butler" diction. But what really has my attention is: Why is this something I'm reading about on this smart engineer's blog rather than an Apple or Google product release? The fact that even this small set of features is beyond the abilities of either of those two companies to ship -- even with caveats like "…

Take a look at Home Assistant - I would argue their implementation is currently better than both Siri & Gemini assistants.

HA team is releasing actually useful updates every month - eg ability for assistant to proactively ask you something.

In my opinion both Google & Apple have huge issues with cooperation between product teams, while cooperation with external companies is next to impossible.

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

#146

Post by ymarketing »

loremm wrote: post #80
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…

For gmail, there's also an amazing thing where you can hook it with pubsub. So now it's push not pull. Any server will get pubsub little webhooks for any change within milliseconds (you can filter server side or client side for specific filters) This is amazing, you can do all sorts of automations. You can feed it to an llm and have it immediately tag it (or archive it). For important emails (I have a specific label…

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

#148

Post by z3ratul163071 »

jredwards wrote: post #104

I've been kicking around idea for a similar open source project, with the caveats that: 1. I'd like the backend to be configured for any LLM the user might happen to have access to (be that the API for a paid service or something locally hosted on-prem). 2. I'm also wondering how feasible it is to hook it up to a touchscreen running on some hopped-up raspberry pi platform so that it can be interacted with like an Ale…

I've created exactly this for myself: https://v3rtical.tech/public/sshot.png

It runs locally, but it uses API keys for various LLMs. Currently I much prefer QwQ-32B hosted at Groq. Very fast, pretty smart. Various tools use various LLMs. It can currently generate 3 types of documents I need in my daily work (work reports, invoices, regulatory time-sheets).

It has weather integration. It can parse invoices and generate QR codes for easy mobile banking payments. It can work with my calendars,

Next I plan to do the email integration. But I want to do it properly. This means locally synchronized, indexable IMAP mail. Might evolve into actually usable desktop email client (the existing ones are all awful). We'll see...

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

#149

Post by voidUpdate »

sneak wrote: post #97

Telegram isn’t end to end encrypted. Why would you use an insecure app to transmit private family information like this?

Because you're already sending it to Claude, so why bother with privacy at this point?

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

#150

Post by bobnamob »

paulnovacovici wrote: post #21

Curious, 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

A single cloudflare durable object (sqlite db + serverless compute + cron triggers) would be enough to run this project. DOs have been added to CFs free tier recently - you could probably run a couple hundred (maybe thousands) instances of Stevens without paying a cent, aside from Claude costs ofc
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