Meet Ace

I'm building my own AI native executive assistant. It's called Ace assistant.

I named it after my first dog I had as an adult that I miss a lot and who was always trying to be helpful.

It's not a "to-do" app. It's an opinionated system that is built from the beginning to be interacted with via an agent like Claude code, any other agent, or potentially a regular chatbot of choice via an MCP.

The UX is still way below my own personal quality bar, but it's decent and I've been polishing it.

Here's what it can do so far since initial commit on December 13th, working on it here and there:

Keep track of projects + actions

Keep track of projects and actions

This is a web application that replaces my complicated airtable + omnifocus setup I've been failing at keeping up to date since my second kid was born almost four years ago.

It helps me track what's active, what's next, ongoing focus areas, what's "incubating", and what's a "someday / maybe" and defer things that don't need to be thought about until they are.

It's broken down by Work and Personal, with flexible categories. Mine include things like Rootnote (my main client), side projects, business admin, business development, home projects, family things, health things, etc.

Easy inbox capture

Easy inbox capture

The #1 thing I took away from David Allen's "Getting Things Done" when I first read it 10+ years ago is that your brain is great for having ideas, but not for storing them.

Creating an inbox and processing workflow for it was probably the most important feature for me.

I still need a lot more surface area for more easily capturing inbox items especially on my phone to match what I was doing with omnifocus.

But I've got a good start here, with quick capture in the app, and a working email capture address that will take emails sent or forwarded to a generated address from authorized senders and drop it in the inbox.

AI chatbot / agent orientation + review

AI chatbot and agent orientation

Right now these are slash commands that only I can use, but it brings the smarts of Claude into helping me review quickly what's important and what's not, and what may be missing so that I can add it and still get a more traditional view in the app. The prompts here are something I'll be tweaking as I figure out what works.

I'm currently working on the first version of the authenticated cli that I can publish to npm so it can be used by others and their agent of choice if they want. I plan to publish a repository of skills, etc so prompts can be tweaked to suit.

Automated updates / daily journals

Automated updates and daily journals

Ace pulls from other systems that are integrated + connected to build and store a daily log of what happened. I can use this to make standup updates easier, plus give me raw material to make it easier to follow through on sharing what I'm building + learning, and having something easy to digest to look back on when I think "what did I work on this month?"

Right now, it's integrated with just itself and github.

Google calendar, slack, and linear are next to fill out my personal "good enough," but if anyone else ever uses this besides me I can imagine many integrations being useful for this.

I would love email too, but at least for google it's a restricted permission (for good reason) that requires an ongoing 3rd party audit, etc. I'm not quite ready to commit the time and money to that yet, but may dabble with it for myself until I see whether this is something many people might want to pay for.

Calendar "Busy" Sync

Calendar Busy Sync

I have accumulated a lot of different calendars as part of both consulting work and personal things - now that I'm working closer to full time with one client, it's nice to be able to sync up those calendars at least for Free / Busy status on the calendar so that people on the team can tell on their calendar when I'm available.

The app will sync multiple google calendars marked as "Read Only" and create "Busy" blocks matching items on a "Write Only" calendar.

I'm still working through approval to use these scopes with google, but they're not restricted like email is so just a time and attention thing.

Waiting List

I do want to make this available to others as a paid product. I think it's likely a pipe dream that it will be a meaningful income source for me, but I want it to exist for me and be good enough that others are able to and want to keep using it as a paid product that's worth the money.

But, it's not fully ready yet and I want to make sure I am able to respond to any feedback - so I built a waiting list feature to let people in.

There's no billing code yet so nobody who wants to poke around with this early is going to pay anything, but I do want it to be a paid product.

If it's "Bring your own AI" the cost of goods sold will be lower, but even without tokens to pay for, it still has hosting costs. I tried to do all local with sqlite at the beginning but couldn't make it work - maybe someday!

Roadmap

• Integrations for updates - google calendar, linear, slack, granola if possible
• CLI + skills for agent usage vs. custom scripts only I can use
• Incorporate yearly themes for use in orientation, review with agent
• More frictionless inbox capture mechanisms (mac app with keyboard shortcuts, ios app that can capture via siri, etc)
• Lots of polish / UX improvement
• Extend cli code with MCP support for usage inside regular ChatGPT, claude, gemini, etc. - I do expect meaningful change here so we'll see.
• Email (if enough traction + interest)
• Ace brings the AI vs. you bring your own (if there's interest + willingness to pay for tokens + margin)
• Fully native apps with offline / syncing (maybe - the agent part of this is for now still an online thing but I'm also interested in dabbling with self hosting if I need to be offline, etc)

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