Meet Pip, my new favourite agent

When OpenClaw became mainstream this year, everyone lost their minds. It really felt like agents were here to help us with everything. We soon found out that these agents were only as good as the models they used.

If you’re like me, you probably set up OpenClaw and asked your agent to do everything: manage contacts, handle email, book tickets, order food, build apps, act as your life coach and more. The problems, however, were the context window and token cost. The more you asked agents to do, the more context they ate up and the dumber they seemed to get. Not only did they get dumber, they charged more too. 

Even so, many of my friends were excited. They bought Mac minis, set up OpenClaw…and used it for a couple of days. Those Mac minis are now collecting dust. If you’ve read my other posts, you’ll know I set up OpenClaw as a Docker container running on a mini PC in my homelab. My OpenClaw is still running and I’ve grown to find it really useful. 

How did I prevent my OpenClaw from collecting dust? The biggest shift for me was moving from a jack-of-all-trades agent to a collection of specialised ones. My team consists of two agents. You may laugh at their job descriptions. They’re small, but useful! 

Having a specific agent means it’s less likely to get confused with lots of context switching and it’s going to perform better for you. Since it’s only doing a specific task, it’ll send less unrelated context to your AI model, using fewer tokens and saving you money. 

Running multiple agents costs me less than $30 (USD) per month. Mine run on a single $20/month ChatGPT subscription. I do have other models configured for pay as you go via the Gemini API and OpenRouter. I’m still experimenting with which models work best for which agents – that’s where the extra $10 gets spent.

Meet Arnie

My first useful agent was Arnie. He’s my workout coach. I realised that the most impactful thing about having a human coach wasn’t the workout programme – it was the regular check-ins and motivation to get a workout done, even on a busy day. Arnie gives me exactly that. Every day he asks me about my workout progress and gives me a hard time when I don’t reply! At the end of the week he reflects on his progress as a coach and on mine as I aim for my fitness goals. He improves his approach and tries again the following week. It’s working well for me. 

Meet Pip

My second agent is Pip. She is my family operations manager. I recently became a father and found myself overwhelmed by all of the things we needed to remember – especially all the appointments for the little one. Since we are trying to avoid using screens around the baby, simple things like adding events to the calendar became a chore. This is where Pip comes in. She manages our family calendar and CRM. 

Calendar

My wife and I talk to Pip in a WhatsApp group, adding very little overhead to our existing process. Before Pip, my wife and I would message each other about an appointment on WhatsApp. If I was awake enough, I’d add it to the calendar too, but not always. Now, with Pip I just message our “family operations” chat and a few things happen. First, my wife receives the message in the group and can mentally note an upcoming appointment. Second, Pip grabs the information and creates a new event in our family Google Calendar. She invites both of us to the event. She knows where we are likely to be and adds commute events before and after any event she adds to the calendar.

What’s great is Pip can handle images too. Invitations, travel confirmations and more, all handled with ease. Pip extracts what’s relevant and adds it to the calendar. It seems small, but it’s had such a positive impact on our quality of life. 

Pip handles voice notes too – it really feels like having a human assistant. The other day I had lunch with a friend and we got to talking about taxes (as one does) and I remembered I needed to pay mine. I took out my phone, opened WhatsApp, sent a voice note to Pip, “hey Pip, remind me tomorrow after lunch that I should pay my taxes”. Yes, I know I could ask a voice assistant on my phone but they don’t (yet) have the ability to take into account my calendar. Because I said “after lunch”, Pip was able to slot this reminder into my calendar after my existing plans.

CRM

Pip is how I manage contacts. I run a self-hosted CRM called Monica. I am slowly populating it with names and birthdays of family and friends. Pip has access to the Monica CRM API and queries it every day. She lets us know of upcoming birthdays a week in advance and then again on the day. What’s more, she now handles my brain dump of relationships: “Alice had a son called Bob last week on Thursday, make sure he’s in the CRM.” Pip will clarify which Alice and add a family connection in the CRM along with an inferred DOB. Again, this may seem trivial but it’s been so helpful for us. I would like to get to the point where Pip is a little less split-brained and can correlate calendar events with the CRM, so she can suggest meetings with friends we haven’t seen in a while. 

The aha moment for my wife

My wife wasn’t a big fan of Pip at first. She values human connection and was worried the agent would cause us to talk less. For the longest time, she didn’t engage with Pip, but then she surprised me and messaged her! She asked for a weather report each morning, to help her decide how to dress the baby. Pip obliged, adding a cron job to send weather updates each morning at 7am. 

Pip didn’t reduce the conversation between my wife and me. She just reduced the number of tactical conversations we would have asking each other what we are doing this week or “did you add that to the calendar?”. Pip lets us be more present with each other and our baby, spending fewer minutes a day on our phones doing admin.

Handling more tasks

We are slowly asking Pip to do more for us. Each week she sends us expected developmental milestones for our little one, along with things we can do as parents to support her. 

Recently, we have had visitors from overseas, so I’ve been asking Pip to track flights and give me updates on their progress, saving me from checking flight tracking sites. Pip remembered my preferences as a new “skill” so every time I send her a flight number, she knows exactly what to do: a message if delayed and another two for take-off and landing. 

Start with a specific agent

I encourage you to make an agent for yourself. Learn from my mistakes. Find a specific pain point that’s a small burden on your day and hand it off to your agent. If you’re not sure where to start – copy me. Ask your agent to handle adding calendar events or managing contacts. 

Give your agent access to your apps

I find agents work best when they don’t need to create their own structure. That means they aren’t juggling lots of text files to remember your calendar events or contacts. Instead, they should be using applications via an API or MCP to store the important information. This has two nice side effects. First, you can always see and edit information via the app yourself. Second, it’s predictable. I had started with an agent that used markdown files to manage relationships but it wasn’t great. Some days it made a new file per person. Other days it decided it would be better to merge them all into a big “people.md” file. What a mess. I couldn’t do anything without asking the agent and sometimes it wouldn’t be able to undo its own mess.

You don’t need to use OpenClaw

The agentic space has moved on so much since the start of the year that you don’t even need to stick with OpenClaw. You can use Hermes or even an offering from popular AI services like ChatGPT Work, Claude Cowork or Gemini Spark.

Let me know

If you have a specific agent already or build a new one, let me know what it does by leaving a comment below or sending me an email. I’d love to hear how you are making agents work for you.