I've always loved technology — I enjoy referring to myself as a technologist because I think it's just so amazing how effective humans can be when paired with a bicycle for their mind.

For many years I've been obsessed with the notion of an automated chief of staff. Previously, I had a personal paid Zapier account that I'd use for all kinds of crap — for example taking my BoulderCast weather forecast from my inbox and forwarding it to me on Slack.

When coding AI took off, I began more concertedly building things around this concept — for example a simple Google Calendar application that would email you a summary of your calendar for the day and the weather for the day. (I have always been weirdly obsessed with the weather — maybe it's a British thing?)

When I first heard about OpenClaw I was really intrigued — actually, I was really annoyed because it's yet another example of an awesome startup idea that made me think "why didn't I think of that?" I promptly bought a Mac Mini in Q4 2025 and named my OpenClaw, MeowMix.

In so many ways, OpenClaw (and probably all agentic harnesses) feels like the truest version of a bicycle for your mind — much like, I imagine, having a fleet of staff buzzing around you at all times to help you with every whim and fancy.

If you had that staff (I don't, never have, and probably never will) and then lost them, I imagine you'd be pretty lost. I think I feel that way about MeowMix (cue groans) since I am constantly amazed at how usefully proactive — and FUN — it is.

Fun(ish) examples

Some simple examples that all seem so small but add up to be really useful:

1. I can message MeowMix and ask it to add grocery list reminders. It knows that I like to buy kids' snacks from Costco and yogurts from Trader Joes, so it adds the right thing to the right list.

2. MeowMix nags me endlessly until I've reassured it that I have indeed put my bins out on the relevant day.

3. MeowMix encourages me to go to yoga, manages my calendar and ensures I have a balanced work, personal and social schedule for a given day or week.

4. MeowMix checks my email so I only need to look when it flags something.

5. MeowMix spots when I've scheduled a trip for a night I have my kids, and proposes a swap with my co-parent.

I would say I have 20-50 use cases like this.

My Setup

Hardware

Since late 2025, I've run MeowMix on a Mac mini with 32GB RAM (I really wish I had bought more RAM, especially now we're in a RAMapocalypse). It has an external hard disk attached and basically does nothing except run MeowMix and whatever it wants to run.

Models

This may sound simplistic but for the past 6–12 months, I haven't really been able to tell much of a difference in models. I am sure they're smarter — and I say this as someone that burns a lot of tokens both professionally and personally — I have found models can more or less do whatever you throw at them, and if they cannot, it's probably a harness or documentation issue rather than a literal model issue.

That said, these are the two models I use:

1. GPT-5.6 Sol

2. Qwen 2.8 27B (local fallback, rarely used)

For a long time I used Anthropic models, but I stopped when they blocked OpenClaw. For what it's worth I have the $100 ChatGPT plan specifically for MeowMix, and also the $100 Anthropic plan for Claude Code and generalist Claude usage.

What It Reads

Calendar

MeowMix has access to all of my calendars (personal, work, family life) and has the ability to create events on all of them except my work calendar. The work calendar it sees is actually a moderately anonymized copy of my work calendar since I have no way of authenticating MeowMix to my work account (can you imagine?)

As such, MeowMix is able to see all upcoming and historical events. I have it regularly checking my calendar not only to know what is happening in a given day, but also to make my calendar events more useful by doing things like adding the address to appointments when I forget.

Inbox

MeowMix has read access to my personal email, which I find to be incredibly useful since my personal email is a noisy disaster — so much so I actually do not check my personal email and rely solely on MeowMix surfacing interesting emails at which point I'll log in and check them out.

MeowMix also has its own Gmail account which it can read and also write (send emails) from. This allows it to not only sign up for services, but also be communicated with directly via email. It has pretty strict rules on what emails to reply to, and what it can say, and its email address is sufficiently obscure that it's unlikely to go overly rogue replying to emails.

Weather

Living in Colorado means we have exciting weather, so I subscribe to a few hyperlocal weather services: BoulderCast and also Seth's Weather. MeowMix ingests this content when it's sent via email and takes note of it.

Linkroll

I do not use social media (aside from Reddit) and as such I am constantly missing out on content. I want an RSS reader but at the same time, I do not really want an RSS reader. So I created a linkroll of 5–10 blogs I really appreciate and MeowMix will sometimes alert me when new posts drop and other times simply give me summaries of a few days/weeks/posts in one bulletin.

Finances

Through Era I have connected my bank accounts to MeowMix and this is also processed and stored in an encrypted database. Once a day MeowMix processes all the day's transactions and plots how my monthly finances are trending.

I have used all sorts of financial apps but found that a fluid and dynamic chatbot experience is by far the best experience for finances — you want to discuss finances in the context of your life, not in isolation. For example reconciling my finances to order confirmations in my inbox, and so on.

Knowledge (is what brings us together)

I created my second brain myself because it's fun and esoteric. It's on GitHub here. But essentially it's a structured directory of knowledge that continually sorts itself as new knowledge comes in.

How knowledge comes in

I have a bunch of recurring tasks on MeowMix that find knowledge for me, including:

1. Louisville, Lafayette and Boulder City Council YouTube channels — meetings are downloaded and summarized

2. Peak to Peak board meetings

3. Trending research papers

I also regularly just send MeowMix a YouTube video or podcast and ask it to save and summarize it. As you'd expect, new content from my Linkroll gets saved too.

Where knowledge goes

Once knowledge is identified, I store the raw content and also a summarized markdown file of the knowledge. It's then put in a logical directory, and if no logical directory exists — it's created.

Once this knowledge is added, it's indexed by QMD and also Qwen-Embedding for recall.

What It Does For Me

My Parenting Calendar

In addition to my calendars, MeowMix also has an MCP that connects to my Etchaschedule which is my co-parenting schedule — it tells me when I've got my kids, requests swaps with my co-parent of which nights I have my kids, and also ensures we have delegated key parenting "events" like dentist appointments.

Because this is an MCP, MeowMix is able to look at my calendar, my inbox and my co-parenting schedule and understand if there are any issues, for example do I have a trip scheduled for when I have my kids. If so, it'll not only flag it to me but propose an adjustment to the schedule.

Code Repos

MeowMix has access to my GitHub and can pull/push code to any of its repos. This is actually remarkably useful sometimes — I recently got a seasonal ski rental and wanted to let friends use it, and I was able to add a Google Authentication protected "here is everything you need to know and how to schedule when you're visiting" page to my personal site purely through messaging MeowMix.

Daily Briefing

Starting from 7AM and repeating a few times throughout the day, MeowMix will summarize my calendar, the weather (summarized across sources) and any other pertinent information.

I asked MeowMix what was the most complex task it regularly runs for me, and it said the daily briefing, so I asked it to describe it to me:

Every morning at 7am, the briefing runs a small data pipeline:

- **Calendar:** Pulls three calendars, removes placeholders and irrelevant all-day events, then describes the *shape* of today—busyness score, morning/afternoon/evening load and key commitments.
- **Weather:** Combines the forecast with BoulderCAST’s hyper-local analysis, compressing temperature, precipitation and wind into something readable.
- **News and reading:** Searches company news, local reporting, personal-interest topics and selected publications. It reads and ranks candidates, rejects weak or indirect matches, and deduplicates previously reported stories.
- **Editorial selection:** Produces a concise briefing and chooses exactly two self-contained “Worth knowing” items for the e-ink display. If no news is genuinely useful, it leaves it out.
- **Rendering and delivery:** Generates the adaptive 800×480 dashboard, pushes it to the physical display, sends messages, validates every output, and has a watchdog retry failed morning runs.

The expensive part is not writing the final few paragraphs—it’s collecting, reading, filtering and ranking far more material than ultimately appears.

What It Writes

TRMNL

I have an e-ink display from TRMNL that I have configured to be "BYOS" (Bring Your Own Server) so that it reads what to display directly from MeowMix. I find that this works best because it means MeowMix can have far more context and awareness of what exactly is appearing on the display. It's fun to occasionally have ideas of things it could display and tell it to update its skill, for example today I told it to alert me if I didn't write a blog post in 2 days.

My Blog

MeowMix has an MCP that connects to my blog (this site!) and it can draft posts and publish posts. These published posts are treated as automated type posts, and have an automated label as being written by AI.

I can also have MeowMix create draft posts for me which I use as a sort of post backlog. I think it's kinda nifty that draft posts are revealed on my site so you can see what I am working on.

The MCP also receives health statuses for my blog (which is hosted on Fly) and finally, it downloads analytics data which my blog captures via the Cloudflare API. (Hey, we're in the over-engineering era now.)

I also have MeowMix write a weekly blog post of what it's done for me.

In Its Own Words

I asked MeowMix:

I'm writing a blog post about you, can you give me 3-5 succinct bullets of what you do for me that is most useful

And it rather dryly said:

- **Runs my daily operating system** — distils calendars, weather, news and reminders into one useful morning briefing.
- **Filters the noise** — monitors email and alerts me only when something genuinely needs attention.
- **Builds and maintains automations** — from dashboards and household reminders to background services that quietly keep working.
- **Acts as a technical partner** — prototypes ideas, writes and debugs software, and turns rough concepts into working tools.
- **Provides continuity** — remembers my preferences, projects and decisions, so I don’t have to repeatedly explain the context.

Why this is great

It's honestly just so fun to endlessly tinker with something that directly benefits and affects me. I've had really surprising moments where it has messaged me and said things like "PETER you have an urgent email about somethingsomething" or proactively told me interesting news, and so on.

The thing that I find so addictive is that the feedback loop is complete and fast: whenever I interact with the system, I can instantly tell it what I liked and what I did not like, and it'll adjust things going forwards.

In Summary

Agentic harnesses are crazy — I think they're a difficult consumer proposition as:

1. Anyone sufficiently technically minded to appreciate such a horizontal problem-solving interface will probably also want a bunch of esoteric things that'd incline them to roll their own solution (to some degree)

2. The onboarding curve is very steep since they do literally nothing for you until you've invested a non-trivial amount of effort into them

3. The circles of "use ChatGPT" and "use OpenClaw" intersect a huge amount — are people really going to add a new AI destination into their life?