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

Posted by stevekrouse 4/14/2025

A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs(www.geoffreylitt.com)

800 points | 174 commentspage 3

avinassh 4/15/2025|

For "memory", I wonder how it would be if you use vector search in SQLite and pass that info to reduce context size. The ValTown SQLite should have support for vectors API - https://docs.turso.tech/features/ai-and-embeddings#vectors

hiatus 4/14/2025||

Is there some way to git clone this? It appears to use git under the hood but doesn't offer a publicly accessible interface.

larsonnn 4/14/2025||

I argue that this kind of tools are fun to play but in the end is it really helpful? I start my day like every day and on work I just check the calendar. My private calendar has all Information i need. Where is the gap where an Assistent makes sense and where we are just complicating our lives?

runjake 4/14/2025||

If it's not helpful don't use it.

Personally, this appears to be extremely helpful for me, because instead of checking several different spots every day, I can get a coherent summary in one spot, tailored to me and my family. I'm literally checking the same things every day, down to USPS Informed Delivery. This seems to simplify what's already complicated, at least for my use cases.

Is this niche? I don't know and I don't care. It looks useful to me. And the author, obviously, because they wrote it. That's enough.

I can't count the number of useful scripts and apps I've written that nobody else has used, yet I rely on them daily or nearly every day.

theshrike79 4/16/2025|||

Now think of this at a family level. You have 2+ people with shared calendars and events.

Do you sit down as a family every morning and go through your calendars and sync up?

Or would it be better to have an automated summary posted to the family Telegram channel with "Bob has a dentist today at 1300, which overlaps with Mia's football practice, so Sara has to pick her up. Also it's going to rain so prepare accordingly."

larsonnn 4/17/2025||

When you are sharing the calendar it will be synced on every device. And yes as a family we go through all dates on Sunday for the next week.

Which is a nice time with the family we are sitting drinking coffee also with other family members.

When you Lack so much organization skills the AI would never get the data to write you this.

ilrwbwrkhv 4/14/2025||

The AI assistant is the male equivalent of a beautifully organized notion board (female).

emporas 4/14/2025||

It reminds me of "Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI."

The more i think about it however, command line applications are about as interactive as a program can be.

Let's say one is interested to find out which one of the following 7 next days is gonna rain and send it to a telegram bot. `weather_forecast --days 7 | grep rain` | send_telegram.

The whole thing of off-loading everything to nondeterministic computation instead of the good ol determinism does seem strange to me. I am a huge fan though, of using non-deterministic computation for creating deterministic computation, i.e. programming.

/As a side note, i have played chess against Ishiguro many times on lichess.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/15/1079624/deepmind...

ajcp 4/14/2025||

I'm a little confused as to the 16-bit game interface shown in the article. Is that just for illustration purposes in the article itself, or is there an actual UI you've built to represent Steven/Steven's world?

simonw 4/14/2025||

It's a real UI - the code for that is here: https://www.val.town/x/geoffreylitt/stevensDemo/code/dashboa...

ajcp 4/14/2025||

Thanks for the confirmation! I came across that but am unfamiliar with Val.town so wasn't sure of the repo structure I was looking through.

alexchamberlain 4/14/2025||

Towards the end of the article, the author implies it is real when they explain why they made it that way (TL;DR: A bit of fun)

ajcp 4/14/2025||

I just assumed he was talking about the actual database and LLM setup as the bit of fun :D

lazyeye 4/14/2025||

A nice little project. I think you could probably do the same with N8N running on a raspberry pi.

https://reddit.com/r/n8n

stunnAR 4/14/2025||

This is probably naive and looking forward to a correction; isn't sending your info to Claude's API (or really any "AI API") is a violation of your safeguarded privacy data?

simonw 4/14/2025||

Only if you don't believe the AI vendors when they promise that they won't train on your data.

(Or you don't trust them not to have security breaches that grant attackers access to logged data, which remains a genuine thread, albeit one that's true of any other cloud service.)

ForOldHack 4/14/2025||

I have an AI/bridge to sell you.

simonw 4/14/2025||

Believing vendors who tell you "we won't train on your data" is a huge competitive advantage right now.

jasonjmcghee 4/14/2025|||

Using AWS Bedrock is the choice I've seen made to eliminate this problem.

Everdred2dx 4/15/2025||

How does bedrock eliminate this problem?

jasonjmcghee 4/15/2025||

You aren't sending your data to Anthropic- no one has access to what you send except you. If you use private link, it doesn't even leave your vpc.

redman25 4/14/2025||

You could always run your own server locally if you have a decent gpu. Some of the smaller LLMs are getting pretty good.

n_ary 4/15/2025|||

Correct. My dusty Intel Nuc is able to run a decent 3B model(thanks to ollama) with fans spinning but does not affect any other running applications. It ks very useful for local hobby projects. Visible lags and freezes begin if I start a 5B+ model locally.

theshrike79 4/16/2025||||

Also M-series Macs have an insane price/performance/electricity consumption ratio in LLM use-cases.

Any M-series Mac Mini can run a pretty good local model with usable speed. The high-end models easily compete with dedicated GPUs.

stunnAR 4/17/2025|||

Yes - of course. That's been my experience with "ultimate" privacy.

ww520 4/14/2025||

This is awesome. Keep things simple and direct.

The background tasks can call mcp servers, to connect to more data sources and services. At least you don’t have to write all the connectivities to them.

Sphax 4/14/2025|

This is really cool. How much would that cost in Claude API calls ?

simonw 4/14/2025||

The daily briefing prompt is here: https://www.val.town/x/geoffreylitt/stevensDemo/code/dailyBr...

It's about 652 tokens according to https://tools.simonwillison.net/claude-token-counter - maybe double that once you add all of the context from the database table.

1200 input tokens and 200 output tokens for Claude 3.7 Sonnet costs 0.66 cents - that's around 2/3rd of a cent.

LLM APIs are so cheap these days.

mdrzn 4/14/2025||

You can use Gemini free API calls (limited quantity, but they are plenty)

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