Let's Claude

I've been using Google Gemini for awhile now. I have lots of different conversations going with it about lots of different things. It's been very helpful! For example, it helped me a lot in setting up Proxmox on my MeLe MiniPC and has helped me build some neat services for my house, like a 24/7 "cable" channel that plays a never ending rotation of classic sitcoms. 

For my next trick I have decided to play with Agentic AI and see if I can build the little personal assistant I've wanted for awhile. I've tried so many approaches to personal calendaring / goals / routines before and they just require so much manual effort to manage when often a lot of what you're doing is repetitive...but not repetitive enough to just put in repeating reminders/events and go. Tools like Siri were theoretically supposed to help solve this (and maybe the forthcoming "Better Siri" will help), but haven't. I have plenty of Executive Function in the sense of knowing what I want to do with my life, but keeping on top of that on a day-to-day basis when work is already always a whole series of making decisions all day can really be a drag.

Also, I've liked working with Gemini so much, so why not take that a step further and setup something where my AI project collaborator can also help me find the time on my calendar to do or continue all these great projects we've discussed together. 

Main design goals:

  • It knows my "long term" goals
  • It knows my daily routines
    • Like when I go to work, what day I do laundry, etc.
  • I can simply text it like a friend and it can update my calendar, etc.

I'll be using Anthropic/Claude as my platform (A different conversation for a different day) and Telegram to interact with my bot.

Step one was getting my email and calendar onto a more accessible service (Sorry iCloud). While I love Apple's stance on Privacy, iCloud is not really setup as an extensible, API-accessible service. The best you can do is generate an "app-specific password" that grants access to all iCloud data. No thanks!

This was easy-ish as I switched email for my personal domain to FastMail some time ago, so it was simply a matter of finishing that migration by moving calendars over. I did that about a week ago.

Tonight I started wiring things up. With some help from Claude, I:

  • Setup a Bot on telegram (including API key)
  • Grabbed an API key for my Anthropic account
  • Setup a Debian13 LXC on my Proxmox server
  • Downloaded Python and the appropriate python packages
  • "Wrote" (Claude wrote) a little program that included my API keys.


This did take some skill -- I needed to know what kind of system I wanted to build to get started, and I have plenty of existing skill scripting, working with API keys, and such. When doing things like this, I really think of AI as being a "super personalized tutorial writer" which you can also consult when little bits of the tutorial go wrong, like when Claude initially pointed me toward a non-existent community script to create my Debian machine. 
 
As for the 'Hello World':


It lives!

(This post was written entirely by me, Ryan, but reviewed by Claude which provided some small edits that I made, and some I did not)

(Claude then reminded me the name of my blog software that lives on the computer I haven't used in months -- Publii. And the name of my email newsletter service that I haven't logged into in a year -- Buttondown).