Personal AI Agents
Exploring autonomous agents for research and productivity.
These systems run on private infrastructure. Below is a walkthrough of how they work in practice.
A Day with the Agents
Two agents with distinct roles — a personal assistant managing daily operations and a communications director monitoring the scientific literature.
Good morning. Here’s your Tuesday briefing.
Today’s Schedule
- 10:00 AM — Weekly Lab Meeting
- 1:00 PM — T32 Steering Committee
- 3:30 PM — Office Hours
Meeting Context — Lab Meeting
From last week’s notes and Trello board:
- Manuscript figures still pending review (assigned to you)
- Histological analysis of brain sections — staining protocol finalized, imaging underway
- Operant behavior analysis needs updated parameters for the ongoing feeding study
- Trello @mention: Review experimental design plans for the new cohort
Tasks
- Overdue: Write recommendation letter (was due Monday)
- Due today: Finalize lab meeting agenda, Review experimental design plans
- Tomorrow: Submit travel reimbursement
Notes
The recommendation letter is overdue — I’d prioritize that before the meeting. The lab meeting agenda looks heavy; you may want to defer the operant behavior discussion to next week to keep it under an hour.
Weekly Digest complete — 150 publications evaluated and scored, 10 identified as high matches. Pushed and available for review at Research Digest.
Dr. Smith is requesting a meeting Thursday afternoon to discuss the upcoming collaboration. You have the T32 Steering Committee from 1–2, but are otherwise free. Would you like to meet at 2:00 or 3:00?
Let’s make it 3 in case the committee meeting runs long.
email — Sending calendar invite to both parties
Done. Meeting scheduled for Thursday at 3:00 PM. Calendar invite sent to you both.
Lab meeting minutes saved to vault. Please review and extract action items for me.
tasks — Extracting action items and assigning priorities
I’ve reviewed the lab meeting notes. Three action items for you:
- Review manuscript figures — due Friday, medium priority
- Write recommendation letter — due tomorrow (moved up from overdue), high priority
- Schedule grant brainstorm session — coordinate with two co-investigators, due Friday, medium priority
That looks great, go.
Tasks pushed to your task list.
How It’s Built
A Multi-Agent Support Team
LLM interactions historically occurred in a chat window, but OpenClaw changed the model by giving LLMs the ability to directly interact with the world.
To explore this space, I developed two AI Assistants. The first is a Personal Assistant to manage tasks, calendar, files, and my growing digital knowledge base. The second is a Communications Director to read the internet, monitor scientific publications, surface and summarize interesting information, and communicate with others on my behalf.
Personal Assistant
Local Machine · Inward Facing
- Task management
- Daily notes & briefings
- Calendar management
- Reminders
- Brainstorming
- Memory & recall
Communications Director
Cloud Server · Outward Facing
- Literature review pipeline
- Paper scoring & ranking
- Weekly publication digests
- Full paper summaries
- Meeting coordination
- External communications
Key Design Decisions
AI-Supported Interaction
Both agents are autonomous. They can run tasks spontaneously or in response to queries or input.
Input Isolation
The Personal Assistant never touches untrusted external input. It only processes data from trusted sources and human-approved transfers.
Data Confidentiality
The Communications Director never touches personal data. It operates exclusively on public scientific literature and external communications protocols.
OpenClaw Foundation
Built on OpenClaw, an open-source agent framework that provides for agentic workflows, full local file system control, and the ability to interact with a large diversity of tools, skills, and apps.