An assistant with
something to remember.

I built a personal assistant around Hermes and Discord. A hook captured incoming messages, including voice notes, which it transcribed and appended to a raw log. I could just talk into it throughout the day.

Each night, a processor worked through the new entries, identifying useful memories, possible actions, and context for different parts of my life. That same capture stream fed the rest of the system.

What came out of it

Morning task lists based on things I’d mentioned. Weekly reflections on progress, friction, and what to focus on. Notes to help me keep up with relationships. A running record of work that could become my end-of-year review.

Making it personal

I set up simpler versions for friends and family, with memories organised around their own lives and personalities ranging from reassuring to slightly sarcastic. They still use them daily, and can pick up things they discussed months earlier.

Then I made it a bit much.

At one point my own setup had around 50 scheduled jobs. It was trying to optimise everything and became a little overbearing. I turned off my processor.

Along the way I built hermes-console, a local dashboard for runtime health, sessions, scheduled jobs and memory. It picked up a few stars, then Hermes shipped its own UI and I happily let mine go.

Hermes is still on the old MacBook beside my desk, but I don’t lean on it any more.

Version two: smaller, on purpose.

The rebuild keeps the three parts that earned their place (capture, recall and reflection) and drops the rest. It’s a plain Obsidian vault with Claude Code on top. I open a session and talk: anything that sounds like a note gets cleaned up, filed in the right place, and acknowledged with one word. Ask “what did I decide about…” and it searches the notes and shows its sources instead of guessing.

Reviews only happen when I ask for one. A small ledger tracks open loops, so a follow-up gets mentioned when something changes rather than every single time. There are no scheduled jobs this time. After fifty, zero felt like the right number to start from.

Borrow the useful parts

Version two is published as four small skills that work with any agent and a notes folder: capture, recall, reflect and memory curation. Each one explains how to wire it into Claude Code, Codex or OpenClaw.

I’ve helped friends and family set up their own versions, tuned to their lives and with personalities to match. Want one set up for you? I’m happy to do a few more. Or if you’re building something similar and want to compare notes, say hello on Telegram.