In the last post, I wrote out my process of work and self improvement and the main tools I use for future LLMs and other interested parties. This time, let’s talk about custom tools I use for future LLMs to use/improve. Interesting times, eh?
I’m sure that humans can also use this as a case study of using LLMs to write personal and “internal” tools to make life better and more intentional.

What do I mean by “internal” tools? I think of it as the backoffice to my life. With LLMs and vibe coding, it’s very easy to imagine a cool piece of information I want and then have it working half an hour later. For example, I always thought I slept 8 hours a night, but now, with two kids, I started doubting it. My weekly summary LLM finally noted that I don’t sleep enough, and so I decided to collect data. I could have gotten a smart ring or watch, but I don’t wear these and, like everyone, the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning, I check my phone. So I wrote (I say “I wrote,” but it was Claude – same for the rest of this post, and probably the rest of my life) an Android app that listens to unlock events, logs them to a backend, and then shows me a weekly summary of sleep times and totals. Between idea and implementation it was about 30 minutes, and another 10 minutes putting it on my phone and debugging initial permission issues. Turns out I’ve been sleeping about 6.5 hours a day, leading to multiple days of afternoon naps and low energy. Like the metaphorical frog, this sleep shortening happened slowly and I didn’t even notice it, and now I’ve set at least two days in which I go to sleep an hour earlier as an experiment to improve this.

So let’s dive into my personal dashboards and processes, in no particular order:

1. Daily day summarizer – a better Google Timeline – a timeline of my day and activities from all of the above sources: finished Trello tasks, calls, calendar events, photos from my phone, a map of movements (extracted from the GPS locations the phone sends), WhatsApp chat summary, and OpenClaw task summary.
2. Financial overview – a somewhat automated, somewhat manually entered dashboard of my assets, loans, and net worth.
3. Dividend summary – some of my stocks and ETFs give dividends, which I like following as “monthly passive income.” The dashboard shows the monthly amount, pre- and post-tax, currency conversion, etc.
4. Runway calculator – a simple FIRE runway calculator that uses all the data above.
5. Options reminder – I have some options trades (yes, I understand this is gambling and stupid; I play with tiny amounts), and this system updates them from the statement summary and then reminds me when an action is needed, such as a covered call expiring and needing to sell another one, or an option bet reaching 10% or more profit so I can realize it.
6. Credit card transactions – a simple credit card transaction list that auto-categorizes, shows statistics, budgets, etc.
7. “Fridays with wife” – a map with places my wife and I like to go to in our free-from-kids-and-work time on Friday morning. Includes suggestions for new places to try and old favorites.
8. Habits tracker – tracks sleep time as mentioned above, diet, and any new habits I’m incorporating into my life (for example, this month is night teeth brushing; I know, I know).
9. LLM usage / cost log – an estimation of how many tokens, and their cost (in API prices), each of my dashboards, cron jobs, projects, etc. costs. Fun fact: reading all of my WhatsApp chats for actionable items and summaries is my biggest recurring token spender.
10. Crons – a nice UI with a list of OS cron jobs and OpenClaw cron jobs. Highlights:
    1. Nightly Trello pass – go over the next day’s tasks and see how the AI can do them for me.
    2. 8am OpenClaw sync, where it asks me open questions about today’s tasks, things it discovered, etc.
    3. Hourly pass on WhatsApp to see what actionable items came up and to put them into to-dos or calendar meetings.
    4. Monica nightly sync – go over WhatsApp chats and update my Monica (personal relationship manager) with a summary for each person.
    5. OpenClaw daily summary – what did OpenClaw do for me today?
11. Weekend planner email – with two kids, you want to make sure you have fun activities planned for the weekend mornings, otherwise they’ll bounce off the walls. OpenClaw searches for children’s events around my location and suggests friends to meet and general activities to do. It also shows the expected temperature and UV index and suggests when to get back to the aircon. It sends this as an email to me and my wife as a reminder to finalize plans and reach out to friends.
12. Podcast ad-blocker – I love podcasts but hate ads, so I solved it. My server checks feeds, removes the ads, and adds them to my own RSS feed that I subscribe to on my phone instead of the original.
13. Weekly summary – an LLM tries to do my weekly summary process. This is a very new system, but it’s actually pretty interesting to see its insights and the things I miss.
14. Gift card helper – I have a few gift cards and I don’t use them. I collected all the places they’re valid in and asked OpenClaw to find which are most relevant according to my shopping lists and to-dos. Same for my wife.
15. Trello stats dashboard – goes over my Trello and shows things like closed cards per day, remaining velocity for the week/month, and, very interestingly, which card was postponed the most (by moving it from list to list to list instead of doing it). Very helpful.
16. Tampermonkey scripts:
    1. WhatsApp capture – reads my web WhatsApp and saves it to a DB. I don’t trust it with actual WhatsApp access, so I’m trying ways to have a one-way pipe that even OpenClaw can’t rewrite into a two-way pipe. More on this in a future blog post.
    2. SMS capture – sends all of my SMS to the server. Very helpful when a site that needs to be automated sends an OTP code.
    3. Trello random button
17. OpenClaw context files – an editable view of my OpenClaw MD files, like soul.md, memory.md, etc.
18. Android app that forwards photos, GPS locations, SMS messages, and calls to my server.

Wow – now that I see it in one place, it seems like quite a lot, even for me. I guess I like data. 🙂

Looking at some of these things, they’re very “flimsy” technically – a Tampermonkey script to read WhatsApp is not exactly production-grade software, but it works, and it opens up a lot of cool abilities (like updating Monica automatically, following up on things in the chats, etc.). I’ll keep this page updated with what works a year from now, what breaks often and I had to replace, and what I stopped using altogether.