Looking at the comments here, it appears people are trying to do too much, too soon, which inevitably backfires. The key is to put OC in a sandbox (don't give access to your real accounts, it must have ints own separate non-admin accounts for everything only "invite" with limited access as you would a contractor) and generally treat it as a new employee during a trial period. You'll be surprised by how effective it can be if you pace yourself.
As for "you can easily do X,Y,Z with a cron job" we tech people often underestimate what hiding the complexity could do for UX.
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." -- top comment on "Show HN, Dropbox (2007)
Operations: mostly tasks and reminders, I often think of something while on the road and send a voice message (like I would to a real PA). I use Kokoro-based TTS for local text-to-speech. Anything from "remind me to discuss X with so-and-so tomorrow" to "I have a multiple PoC projects w/ large entities starting next week - think about how I can best handle that" to "brainstorm how can I maximize upfront revenue with them", etc
Sales: using Google/gemini web search API and it's best run off-peak due to rate limits 503 Service Unavailable (everyone is overbooked when it comes to AI) to see what's happening in the space, any new developments involving companies I care about - and send me a daily digest with an overview and conversation topics.
#1 is just Siri/Google Assistant with extra steps (and expense).
#2 could be a scheduled task (cron job or something higher level) that calls a plain old AI provider API. IIRC most providers can even do those natively now.
That would be valid if setting up a scheduled AI task actually took any technical knowledge, but it doesn’t. ChatGPT lets you schedule tasks natively in the UI, and I assume others do as well.
#2: Gemini also has scheduled actions. You can just ask it to give you daily digests about developments in some area, or you could even be in the middle of chatting about some current events, and tell it to notify you when there is new data, etc.
No recurring expense, just the hardware upfront cost. My next step is run the models locally as well. I used to work at FAANG (incl. compliance) and I would never use a cloud-based assistant of any kind.
I have it installed on a dedicated M4 16GB Mac Mini with Telegram, email, and Google Docs integration (the agent has its own accounts). I can chat with it, incl. sending voice messages via Telegram (it can send voice messages back using free TTS run locally).
Using google/gemma-4-31b-it as primary, google-gemini-3.1-pro-preview as secondary (I don't like how it's rate limited).
It's a great personal assistant. Helps me track industry news, key clients, reminds me of important tasks, and helps brainstorm (the rubber duck effect alone is worth it). Now building other skills.
Next step is to run all models locally (I think using Claude/OpenAI APIs is a huge mistake from a privacy standpoint). Since Mac Studios are sold out (and M5 Ultra is not out yet), will probably go with a GX10 or two.
I also feel it's very easy for a good interviewer to bring the conversation back to the desired scenario.
Anything from "imagine we are in a parallel universe where Google Sheets has not been invented yet" to "how would you design a google sheets competitor" would do the trick.
Yeah - for sure. When I’m interviewing I want to give the candidate the best chance of success and to show off both what they know and how they will work with me.
I generally give it three goes with questions like these - the initial ask, and two clarifications. If we’re not getting anywhere I move on.
As for "you can easily do X,Y,Z with a cron job" we tech people often underestimate what hiding the complexity could do for UX.
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." -- top comment on "Show HN, Dropbox (2007)
reply