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

Summary

There’s a lot of hype these days around patterns for building with AI. Agents, memory, RAG, assistants—so many buzzwords! But the reality is, you don’t need fancy techniques or libraries to build useful personal tools with LLMs. In this short post, I’ll show you how I built a useful AI assistant for my family using a dead simple architecture: a single SQLite table of memories, and a handful of cron jobs for ingesting memories and sending updates, all hosted on Val.town. The whole thing is so simple that you can easily copy and extend it yourself. Meet Stevens The assistant is called Stevens, named after the butler in the great Ishiguro novel Remains of the Day. Every morning it sends a brief to me and my wife via Telegram, including our calendar schedules for the day, a preview of the weather forecast, any postal mail or packages we’re expected to receive, and any reminders we’ve asked it to keep track of. All written up nice and formally, just like you’d expect from a proper butler. Here’s an example. (I’ll use fake data throughout this post, beacuse our actual updates contain private information.) Beyond the daily brief, we can communicate with Stevens on-demand—we can forward an email with some important info, or just leave a reminder or ask a question via Telegram chat. That’s Stevens. It’s rudimentary, but already more useful to me than Siri! Behind the scenes Let’s break down the simple architecture behind Stevens. The whole thing is hosted on Val.town, a lovely platform that offers SQLite storage, HTTP request handling, scheduled cron jobs, and inbound/outbound email: a perfect set of capabilities for this project. First, how does Stevens know what goes in the morning brief? The key is the butler’s notebook, a log of everything that Stevens knows. There’s an admin view where we can see the notebook contents—let’s peek and see what’s in there: You can see some of the entries that fed into the morning brief above—for example, the parent-teacher conference has a...