From Keyboard to Coach: Architecting a Personal AI Support System

Most of my life, getting things done meant fingers on keyboard, manually wrangling tasks and notes. Lately, that’s changing. I’m building a personal AI assistant called Coach, and I find myself talking to my computer as much as typing. It’s a weirdly natural shift—asking my AI to draft an email or brainstorm a plan feels like chatting with a super-capable friend. This is why I’m convinced the future of productivity is conversational. Why click and tap through menus when you can just say (or type) what you need?

Designing Coach has been an adventure in itself. Under the hood it’s powered by large language models, similar to the tech behind ChatGPT. But the real magic is hooking those models into my life’s tooling. I’ve connected Coach to my calendars, to-do lists, even my notes app. The idea is that I can ask “What’s on my plate today?” or tell it “Remind me to follow up on that project next week,” and Coach will actually do it. It’s not flawless—sometimes it misunderstands or I have to rephrase—but when it works, it feels like the closest thing to having a personal secretary who lives in my laptop.

What excites me most is how this changes my relationship with technology. Instead of treating my computer like a tool I have to operate, I treat it like a collaborator. I can bounce ideas off Coach, talk through a problem, or get a quick summary of an article while I’m cooking dinner. It reduces the friction between intention and action; I just express what I want in plain language. There’s still plenty to refine (I’m constantly tweaking how Coach parses my requests and grabs the right info), but each iteration brings it closer to the vision: a trusty conversational partner that helps me stay on top of life, one chat at a time.