- Author
- Geoffrey Litt
- Published
- April 2025
- Kind
- Personal blog post describing a hobby project
- Original
- www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-ai-assistant-with-one-sqlite-table-and-a-handful-of-cron-jobs
- Subject
- Databases and storage
- Themes
- Small means
What it is
Geoffrey Litt shows how a simple design can make a useful personal assistant. The post is short and aimed at readers who want to copy it.
What it says
- The assistant sends a morning brief by Telegram with calendar, weather, mail and reminders.
- Its memory is one SQLite table whose entries may carry a date.
- A cron job sends the Claude API the coming week's entries plus background entries.
- Importers pull from Google Calendar, a weather API, scanned postal mail, Telegram and email.
- An importer is any process that adds or edits entries, which can be any text.
- The author says memory can start simple. RAG may be needed as data grows.
- The author says the assistant is a personal project, hosted on Val.town, not a product.
What evidence it gives
The only evidence is the author's own use of the system for a family. There are example screens with fake data and a link to the code. No measurements or user study appear.
Interests and limits
This is one hobby project with small data. The author calls it rudimentary. It was not tested at scale. The author says larger memories may need other techniques.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- The components of agent memory. Martin calls memory a prediction of what will be needed later. Litt's assistant predicts with a calendar. It sends the coming week's entries plus undated background. A date column may be the cheapest forecast of relevance available.