I’ve been spinning up an OpenClaw style agent to start organizing my life better and have some fun. It turns out that 90% of making agents useful in your personal life is having them be able to have access to all your data. If you want your agent to know about your running routines, it needs access to your Strava. If you want to ask it to get some quotes from the transcript of a podcast you listen to you it neesd access to Spotify. Crucially and why the Mac Mini blew up is if you want it to read your texts and remind you what plans you committed to, it needs access to iMessage.

It’s funny in hindsight because I always agreed with the Open Software people in terms of vibes but in practice I was just too lazy to care. I was like I’m never going to do want to do some data analysis on how morning phone usage effects my likelihood of sticking to my running routine, I didn’t see that I’d want a personal skynet to think of fun things to fit into my schedule and keep me on track.

Now I really do feel the tyranny of closed software. So this is a reminder to myself to try and move my “source of truth” for any service to something that atleast has an API and try to make sure I can make kinda one interface for all my personal data.