October 7, 2026

A useful personal agent

I started building a useful personal agent. What makes it useful is that it runs on my computer, but this immediately raises concerns about data exfiltration. I use Apple reminders (among other things) to organise my life so I had it write a little script to be able to interact with those, which works great. One of the main things I want help with is getting a handle on my chaotic piles of todos. They are scattered all over the place and all mixed up. Part of the problem with my current system is that aspirational things are mixed up with hard deadlines, so on busy or unpredictable weeks things that aren’t essential just pile up and stay there and then the “today” list just keeps rolling everything over until there are dozens of things on it, which I couldn’t possibly get done in a single day if I tried. And then I’m just mentally keeping tabs on what is actually important or on a real deadline, which defeats the purpose of the system. […2 min read]

post#ai#ai-agents#ai-assistants#data-security#lethal-trifecta#llms#parenting#personal-agents#personal-knowledge-management#privacy#productivity

October 6, 2026

What would a useful agent be like?

I use coding agents for basically all of my day day to work now. Recently I’ve been seeing more and more consumer-facing agent-like products and have been trying them out but find none are really able to do the things I want, mostly because they are all run by sketchy tech megacorps that I don’t trust and don’t want to connect my data to. Unfortunately Siri still really sucks, but in theory it’s more in the realm of what I actually want and Apple already owns my entire digital life anyway. […3 min read]

post#agent-driven-development#ai-agents#digital-assistants#llms#personal-agents#personal-knowledge-management#productivity#self-hosting

August 2, 2026

Have the models come full circle?

It feels like the big LLMs have come full circle. At first they were too naive to implement meaningful features autonomously and took so much handholding to get anything done it was quite a pain babysitting them. Then they got good enough to do meaningful software engineering work and there was (I now recognize in hindsight) a sweet spot at some point early this year where they got meaningfully better and good enough to take non-trivial work off my hands without causing dramatically more work. But now they're far too eager and require constant babysitting again. […2 min read]

post#agent-driven-development#ai-agents#ai-hype#ai-safety#coding-agents#developer-workflow#llms#software-engineering