I’ve been managing an SRE team at Billie for about 15 months. A month ago, I set up an AI assistant. It’s an open-source gateway called OpenClaw that connects Claude to my tools, and I talk to it through Telegram.

Let me just walk you through last Wednesday.

Before my first meeting, the assistant checked my inbox. Found an invoice from my old tax advisor, a service I’d already cancelled. It drafted a reply asking about formal termination steps and sent it. The email bounced because of a wrong reply-to address. It caught that, resent. By lunch, the advisor had replied with three PDFs to sign. I signed them, the assistant sent them back. Done. That whole thing would’ve sat in my inbox for a week if I’m honest.

Between meetings, I needed to contact my daughter’s English teacher about a bad test score. I emailed the wrong teacher. Turns out there’s an “Elab” teacher and a regular English teacher at her school, and I mixed them up. The assistant dug through my inbox, found the right name from an old email, drafted an apology to teacher #1, wrote a proper message to teacher #2, CC’d my wife. Two emails, right tone, maybe five minutes total.

In the afternoon I had an ADR review at work. The assistant didn’t help with that. It was a room full of engineers debating tradeoffs, and my actual challenge was figuring out when to drive the conversation and when to shut up and let someone else present. That’s a leadership problem. There’s no API for it.

After work, I’d noticed a new community center opening near my apartment while out walking. The assistant looked up their website, I wrote an intro email offering IT help as a neighbor.

Evening: LinkedIn post about a Claude Code plugin. Some journaling about how the day went. Set a reminder to try meditation the next morning.

Tax paperwork, parenting logistics, architecture reviews, community outreach, writing, self-reflection. One Telegram chat, one day.

What I think after a month

The value is in not switching contexts. Each individual thing the assistant did was small. Draft an email, search an inbox, look up a website. But I didn’t bounce between seven apps and three mental modes to get it all done. It happened in one thread, and that thread has memory.

The boring stuff actually gets done now. I still read every email before it goes out. I still decide everything. But the distance between “I should handle this” and “it’s handled” got very short. That tax thing is a perfect example. It’s not hard. It’s not important enough to do right now. So it festers. Except this time it didn’t.

Where it matters most, it’s useless. The ADR meeting, the 1:1s with my reports, the gut feeling that someone on the team is burning out. That’s me. AI clears the admin noise so I can spend more time on those things. It doesn’t make me better at them.

Work and life are in the same stream. My daughter’s teacher and my ADR review happened in the same chat, same afternoon. I know some people find that messy. For me it means fewer things slip through because everything lives in one place.

I don’t have conclusions yet. It’s been a month. I have no productivity metrics, no hours-saved calculations. I just notice that things that used to linger are getting done. Whether that’s genuinely useful or I’m just building a new dependency, I honestly don’t know. Check back in six months.