Personal tool / AI assistant
An assistant I can
actually text.
My calendars live in different accounts. My projects have their own context. I wanted an assistant I could reach from Messages, with a useful picture of what was going on.
My own assistant setup, built on Hermes Agent. This is a project story, not an app available to download.
Meet Vivi.
Vivi is an AI assistant I've configured for my writing, content, and scheduling. I can text her through iMessage. A morning overview brings my calendars and standing reminders into the same message.
That's the experience I wanted to build: a way to reach the help from a place I already use, with enough context to be useful.
The work behind a simple message.
I built the connections that let the assistant work through messaging, set up access to the relevant tools, and separated different kinds of work. Writing and scheduling go to Vivi; technical work goes to a separate assistant, Tilly.
That separation lets each assistant have a clear job. The system can hand work between them, rather than expecting one conversation to handle everything.
How it fits together
From context to conversation.
- 01
Bring the day together.
Read the connected calendars and standing reminders for the morning overview.
- 02
Meet me in Messages.
Send the overview where I can read it and keep the conversation going.
- 03
Keep decisions with me.
Ask for approval before adding calendar commitments or sending something in my name.
Helpful needs boundaries.
I decide what the assistants can access and where they need my approval. A draft, a suggestion, and an action are different things. I've built those distinctions into the setup.
I'm still developing it. A working connection doesn't make an AI's answer automatically correct, so checking the behavior is part of the work.
What I built on.
The foundation is Hermes Agent, an open-source project from Nous Research. My work is the personal setup around it: messaging integrations, assistant roles, handoffs, scheduled routines, and approval rules.
It's an example of the product work I enjoy: choosing useful existing pieces, building what is missing, and making the result fit a person's actual day.