Field notes
How I run my personal AI agent
A look inside my setup: the skills I actually use, the connectors I rely on, and the two dashboards everyone on Claude should build first.
I build AI agents for work. I also run one for myself, all day, every day. It lives on a small server, I talk to it over Telegram, and it quietly handles a big chunk of my business and my life. People keep asking what is actually inside the setup. So here it is: the skills I lean on the most, and the one thing I tell everyone to build first.
Build two dashboards before anything else
You do not write these by hand. You ask your agent to build them, and it does. It writes the server, the frontend, and wires it up for you. Mine took one chat message each.
Token tracker
Watch your spend in real time so the bill never surprises you. This is what keeps my costs honest.
Skills, MCPs & connectors
Everything your agent can do, in one view. Stops me forgetting what I have already wired up.
These two are the basics. If you are running Claude, have both. I check mine constantly. Once you can see your cost and your capabilities at a glance, everything else gets easier to add.
How it all connects
The shape is simple. I send a voice note or a text on Telegram, it routes to Claude with all my skills and context, the agent does the work, and it replies back to me. No app to open, no dashboard to log into for the small stuff. I just talk to it.
The skills I actually use
Each skill is a small folder that teaches the agent how to use one tool or API. These are the ones I reach for the most, not a wish list.
Connectors and MCPs
MCP servers let the agent reach outside tools through clean, structured calls. My main one is Garmin, which gives the agent every health metric off my watch.
How it remembers
The agent starts each session fresh, so a few files give it continuity. MEMORY.md holds the long-term stuff: decisions, lessons, preferences. Daily notes capture what happened that day and feed back into it. SOUL.md is its personality, and USER.md is everything it should know about me. The more it knows, the less I have to repeat myself.
The dashboards it runs for the business
Beyond the two basics, I have the agent run live dashboards for the parts of the business I want to glance at, not chat about. They pull straight from the APIs on every load, so there is no stale data and no database to babysit.
Want to build your own
If you want to start, the path is short.
That is the whole thing. Start small, build the two dashboards, then let it grow with you.