Ops Agent
WhatsApp-First Personal Operations Agent
A personal experiment in building an AI agent from scratch, inspired by all the OpenClaw hype. Delivers a daily morning brief to WhatsApp and stays live as a conversational assistant for on-demand queries, tasks, and free-form AI chat.
Project Overview
Technologies Used
Project Details
With AI agents everywhere in the news and tools like OpenClaw getting a lot of attention, I wanted to actually understand how this stuff works by building one myself. The result is a self-hosted Python agent that sends a daily 07:00 brief to WhatsApp with weather, calendar, inbox, GitHub, crypto, and news, and stays live between briefs as a conversational assistant. You can ask for your agenda, add tasks, query your inbox, or just ask a free-form question in Dutch. Everything runs on my own VPS, data stays in a local SQLite file, and nothing passes through a third-party platform.
Challenge
The main thing I wanted to understand was how to build an agent that feels responsive rather than sluggish. Tools like OpenClaw add managed infrastructure between you and the answer, which works fine for a once-daily brief but feels slow for anything conversational. Building it myself meant I could keep the stack lean and the latency low.
Solution
The conversation.py module is a priority-ordered router: structured Dutch commands (brief, weer, agenda, inbox, followups, taken, taak, klaar) resolve directly to connector calls with no LLM cost or latency; anything unmatched falls to a GPT-4o-mini call with a system prompt constrained to plain text, Dutch, and under 200 words. The morning brief follows the same pattern but uses all six connectors in parallel before composing. A plain-text fallback renderer means the scheduler always produces output even if OpenAI is unreachable. The FastAPI approvals API exposes a human-in-the-loop queue for writes and shell commands. Two systemd services (API + scheduler) on a Ubuntu VPS with nginx and certbot handle deployment and uptime.
Key Features
- Delivers a daily 07:00 morning brief to WhatsApp with weather, meetings, inbox, GitHub items, crypto, and news
- GPT-4o-mini composes a concise Dutch brief under 300 words, ending with three priority actions
- Conversational assistant available any time via WhatsApp: ask for weather, agenda, inbox, or follow-ups on demand
- Task manager built into WhatsApp: add tasks with 'taak:', list with 'taken', mark done with 'klaar'
- Free-form AI chat for any question not matched by a command, grounded in the same connector data
- Policy engine enforces four operating modes from read-only to trusted auto-send
- Any write or shell action outside the trust boundary is queued as a pending approval
- FastAPI approvals API lets you approve or deny queued actions from anywhere
- Typer CLI for running briefs, initializing the database, and managing the scheduler
- OAuth 2.0 flow for Gmail and Google Calendar with token persistence in SQLite
- All data stays local in a single SQLite file on your own VPS, no managed platform required
- Plain-text fallback renderer so the scheduler always produces output without an OpenAI key
Results & Impact
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Built a conversational command router that handles 10+ structured Dutch commands and falls through to free-form GPT-4o-mini for unmatched queries
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Built a connector abstraction (BaseConnector) with health reporting used by Gmail, Calendar, GitHub, WhatsApp, shell, and weather
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Implemented a four-mode policy engine (observe, draft, act_with_approval, trusted_auto) gating all writes and shell commands
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Designed an approvals API with GET /approvals, POST /approvals/{id}/approve, and POST /approvals/{id}/deny endpoints
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Composed morning briefs with GPT-4o-mini using a Dutch-language prompt capped at 300 words with three priority actions
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Added a plain-text fallback renderer so the scheduler always produces output even without an OpenAI key
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Integrated OAuth 2.0 with a browser-based consent flow for Gmail and Google Calendar, storing tokens in SQLite
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Deployed to a Ubuntu VPS with two systemd services (API + scheduler) and nginx reverse proxy with HTTPS via certbot
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Registered Meta WhatsApp webhook for inbound message handling, dispatching replies in background tasks to return 200 immediately
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Configured a shell policy with an explicit allowlist of safe commands and a blocklist of destructive ones