Building my own AI assistant

I got curious about the tech behind AI assistants like ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw when they showed up a few weeks ago. Ran one for a couple of hours on my machine before I got the feeling I didn’t understand the value compared to how many tokens were being used. But an idea was born and I started chatting with Claude Code about possible solutions.

Could you build an AI assistant that used Claude Code itself the way Anthropic intended, without getting blocked like OpenCode users were.

About five months ago Anthropic released the Claude Agent SDK. A way to create tools on your machine that used the internal Claude Code with all its capabilities. That solved the first problem.

The second was about security. The solution was running the assistant inside Docker. A computer inside a computer that only has access to what’s inside.

But to make it valuable it needed access to email, calendar and various other things without exposing keys or giving it direct access. That’s where the idea of a layer in between was born. A proxy written in plain code that decides what the assistant gets to see and what it doesn’t.

The layer provides access to mail, calendar and a way to use more demanding features like speech to text that need more compute. In this layer I also decide what gets filtered before it reaches the assistant and what permissions it has. Not reading certain emails, not sending emails only drafts, not creating calendar invitations with others and so on.

All development is done by me talking to Claude and it talking to the assistant about possible solutions. Then they tell me.

All communication happens through Telegram from my side. I talk and send. It receives and thinks and messages back. It reads through newsletters, sales emails and creates drafts and suggests times when a meeting could work. I tell it to block five minute slots for getting small things done. During the day and night it does research I can read through in the morning. It looks for only positive news on all the major news sites.

And this is just the beginning.