My External Brain in Production

🏕️ No Trolls Allowed #14 📅 Jul 29 – Aug 2, 2026 ⏱ 20 min 🎤 Common sense stage ✅ Accepted

"Every AI chat starts from zero. Mine knows I quit smoking on July 12th, my HRV dropped 11ms last week, and I have a €500K decision pending in September. Here's how." — Opening hook

Architecture

My External Brain in Production — Architecture External APIs Whoop · Strava · Gmail / Calendar · AWS · X/Twitter · GitHub · Žaibas MCP ☁ OpenClaw Gateway · AWS EC2 eu-north-1 MEMORY MEMORY.md daily notes decisions.md projects.md · · · Voyage embeddings semantic search persistent context across all sessions ↑ no goldfish ↑ SKILLS / TOOLS Whoop Strava Gmail / Calendar AWS Costs X / Twitter GitHub Žaibas MCP web search browser control nodes / camera 30+ skill modules SCHEDULER 16 cron jobs morning summary nightly digest crypto alert ZMA reminder health nudges weekly review skill improvement · · · proactive, not just reactive Telegram voice notes text messages outbound alerts Žilvinas 🦒 the human Anthropic Claude API reasoning engine subscription ⏰ scheduled / proactive push (fires without user prompt)

Core Thesis

Most people use AI as a smarter search engine. What if it was infrastructure? Something that wakes up before you do, knows your context, monitors your health, and fixes itself when broken.

Talk Structure

1. Hook — 3 min

"Every AI chat starts from zero. Mine knows I quit smoking on July 12th, my HRV dropped 11ms last week, and I have a €500K decision pending in September."

2. Architecture — 3 min

One diagram: memory files → embeddings → skills → Telegram. Show the shape, don't explain everything.

3. Three War Stories — 10 min

  • Whoop/Cloudflare fix — tokens died overnight → found CF error 1010 (EC2 IP blocked) → added one User-Agent header → fixed. Zero human involvement until the OAuth step.
  • Nightly digest — scans AI content while sleeping, rates by relevance, delivers briefing at 7am. Stopped doom-scrolling.
  • Quit counter — knows Day 1, knows relapses, knows triggers. Not a habit app — a brain that was there.

4. What I Actually Learned — 4 min

  • Context design > model capability
  • Scheduling beats reactive (best value came from things nobody asked for)
  • It's infrastructure now. When it breaks, I feel it.

Prep Timeline