An old MacBook, Claude Code, and a Telegram chat. The simplest personal assistant setup I’ve tried.
“Don’t forget her flowers tomorrow, you know how she loves them.”
The Telegram message landed on my phone right after my girlfriend had finished talking to Monica for the first time.
I’d opened the Telegram chat, half-bragging: look at this thing I built.
She took my phone, found Monica, and went to work. By the time she handed it back, she’d added her birthday, International Women’s Day, our anniversary date, and a quiet list of preferences: She likes the kitchen clean in the morning. She likes fresh flowers.
That was the moment I realised Monica wasn’t only working for me anymore.
Monica is the personal assistant I’ve been running on Claude Code for the last few weeks. She’s modeled on Monica from Friends. She loves order and helps me keep it.
She saves my notes from podcasts and books, keeps my shopping list, runs my calendar, writes drafts, and remembers things I’d easily forget.
So, this is what I wanted to share today:
- 🗂️ My simple personal assistant setup based on Claude Code
- ⚙️ How it works and how you can build your own
Why did I create a personal assistant?
I’m a sci-fi fan, so the idea of an AI assistant always energized me. Especially after watching Her.
For years I’d been building small automations with Keyboard Maestro, Apple Shortcuts, Make and Zapier. For the past few months I’ve been experimenting with openclaw, before finally landing on Claude Code.
And to be honest, I think it works best just because the setup and architecture is so simple.
The three ingredients
Claude Code. A Telegram plugin. An old MacBook Pro running quietly on my desk.
That’s basically it.
Monica lives on the MacBook with her own Google account, calendar and Gmail. When I need her, I open Telegram and send her a voice note. One tap, talk, send.
I think it works especially because it’s:
- Always on (I can contact her anytime.)
- Voice interface (Sending a voice message is just a tap away.)
- Composable (I control the whole setup and can make adjustments easily.)
- Separated (She lives on a second machine with her own accounts. I think about her as my virtual assistant, so she only has access to things I’ve given her.)
How does it work?
I studied the official openclaw architecture and based my setup on it. Here’s a bird’s-eye view if you’d like to model your own.
Core setup:
- Claude Code account
- Official Telegram plugin
- MacBook Pro
File structure:
- Claude.md (main instructions, loaded at the start of each conversation)
- Identity.md (Monica’s character, how she acts)
- Soul.md (her personality)
- User.md (everything she knows about me)
- Tools.md (all the tools she uses)
- Agents.md (how she operates, file handling, calendar conventions etc.)
- Memory.md (things I want her to remember from our conversations)
Interface: voice mode + text
Organization system: I use the PARA method from Building a Second Brain. It helps me organize files and projects easily.
Integrations, tools and skills:
- whisper.cpp (running locally for voice transcription)
- Gmail (MCP) for reading, drafting etc
- Google Calendar (MCP) for events and invites
- Google Drive (MCP) for documents
- Notes scribe (based on my podcast scribe, takes my notes from podcasts, books, etc.)
All the things she does for me now
I think of it as building my own small apps. For example, I don’t really need Readwise now if I can just take photos or add a voice note from my favorite book and save them as notes.
Here are all the things she does for me right now:
- Sends me a morning brief (weather, an inspiring quote, what’s on my calendar, etc.)
- Runs my calendar (adding, editing, sending invites, etc.)
- Saves my shopping list (with categories)
- Remembers food I love (dishes and ingredients I keep coming back to)
- Saves ideas (catching them on the fly, with statuses)
- Saves notes (from books, podcasts, talks, with exact quotes and source refs)
- Tracks daily metrics (food prep time, anything I want to measure)
- Curates travel inspirations (places I want to visit, organized by city)
- Researches events weekly (conferences, festivals I want to go to)
- Researches and filters (site-searches, etc.)
- Drafts emails for me to review
So what’s next?
As you can see, it’s only a start. She’s doing so well that I’ll keep adding new responsibilities.
One thing’s for sure: building this has been pure fun so far.
Originally published on Substack 👉 https://readwhitespace.substack.com/p/an-assistant-named-monica
Leave a Reply