Simon Willison’s Weblog

Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs. Geoffrey Litt reports on Stevens, a shared digital assistant he put together for his family using SQLite and scheduled tasks running on Val Town.

The design is refreshingly simple considering how much it can do. Everything works around a single memories table. A memory has text, tags, creation metadata and an optional date for things like calendar entries and weather reports.

Everything else is handled by scheduled jobs to popular weather information and events from Google Calendar, a Telegram integration offering a chat UI and a neat system where USPS postal email delivery notifications are run through Val's own email handling mechanism to trigger a Claude prompt to add those as memories too.

Here's the full code on Val Town, including the daily briefing prompt that incorporates most of the personality of the bot.