Your AI assistant.
Your box. Your rules.
Guides and templates for building a private, self-hosted AI assistant — Telegram front-end, MCP tools, cron automations, and an ops runbook that keeps it alive.
Start free. Go as deep as you want.
Ops Runbook
The symptom → diagnosis → fix → prevent playbook for the seven ways a self-hosted assistant breaks.
Get the runbookThe Guide
The full build, module by module: Telegram, the brain, MCP hands, cron, multi-model delegation.
Read the guideGuide + Kit
Everything in the Guide plus the template repo — 27 files of config, skills, and checklists, ready to adapt.
Get the bundleAlso on Kindle: the Guide for $9.99 ↗
Four skills. Zero dollars. MIT.
agent-backup
Snapshot your agent's config to a private git remote on a schedule. Rebuild a dead box in minutes.
idea-inbox
Capture a timestamped idea to a backlog file and commit it — zero friction, never lose a thought.
vault-query
Let your assistant search a local Markdown/Obsidian second brain via MCP — gotchas already solved.
nightly-reflection
Summarize the nightly self-review logs your reflection cron writes, so it learns from its own patterns.
From the blog
How to Keep Your Self-Hosted AI Assistant's Bill in Single Digits
Run a private AI assistant for a few dollars a month: route cheap tasks to cheap models and save the expensive one for when it matters.
7 Ways a Self-Hosted AI Assistant Breaks (and How to Fix Each)
The seven failure modes that take down a self-hosted AI assistant — and the shape of the fix for each, from real production boxes.
Give Your Self-Hosted AI Assistant Hands: Files, Calendar, and Email over MCP
A chatbot answers questions. An assistant does things. How to wire a self-hosted AI assistant to your files, calendar, and email safely with MCP.