I love AI personal assistants but objectively they're still terrible. (A Lefos review) | Tech Stackups

Skip to main content<br>I've been a heavy user of LLMs as personal assistants since around 2023 when I hooked up OpenAI to a Telegram bot. I did it because I could, but it was a hit with some friends and family members. 'Gai Bot' is now part of most of my Telegram groups and we use it for all kinds of things, from reminders, to winning arguments, habit tracking, and interior design help.

I also use AI assistants for work. In this context, I use command line agents more heavily. I have Claude Code, Codex, Amp, Pi, and Gemini (the last only if I'm really hurting for weekly quota). I have one folder called 'cfo' (originally Chief Financial Officer, but now I think of it as "Claude's Effen On it"), which is augmented with an email account, some skills, and some API keys to GitHub and Bridge. I call this one "Al", short for "Alan" or "Alice" to be gender neutral and a fun play on "AI" in many fonts.

More recently I tried Lefos by Earendil. Below, I describe my experiences testing out Lefos to see if it would work for me as a replacement for Gai Bot, Al, or both.

A tale of three assistants<br>While I've steadily hacked on Gai Bot over the last three years, I haven't put too much effort into it and with the rise of OpenClaw et al, it now feels decidedly dated. It can't really do things in the way OpenClaw can – it has the intelligence of the frontier models but it doesn't have an agent loop or a dedicated machine to install software.

This is both good and bad. Gai Bot is a lot more predictable and reliable than OpenClaw (at least for me, I constantly had to babysit my OpenClaw setup, fixing the WhatsApp connection, updating the model, and reconfiguring it after it tried to configure itself wrong), but it's also limited to a very minimal feature set. Gai Bot can't join a bot-only social network for example, but also I don't need to worry that it's going to go and join a bot-only social network.

Then I have a bunch of hacky stuff that I use to help run my business, mainly built around Claude Code. I'm not sure if it counts as 'an assistant' but if you squint a bit it is one. I use Al heavily for finance stuff – she (it?) has its own email address and I forward invoices, accountant emails, and a few other things. Al has skills to help me prepare payroll every month, calculate profit and loss metrics, and a bunch of other things. But Al isn't really an assistant. Al is a ball of mud and a TODO item far down on my list to clean it up.

In reality I want something that sits in between Gai Bot and Al. Something more capable than my simple Telegram bot, and something more reliable and serious than OpenClaw, but something that's more cohesive and independent of me than my Al scripts.

Anyway, I came across Lefos by Earendil recently and it seemed like it might be exactly what I wanted.

It's built by Armin, who I've followed since I got into Flask in 2010, who recently started a new venture with Mario and some others. Mario, Armin, and Pete are part of the Vienna School of Agentic Coding – a group of engineers who've been experimenting together since early 2025, building things like Vibe Tunnel right after Claude Code launched which I briefly tried and Pi, an open-source coding agent that I use daily. Anyway they're cool people with good reputations of building stuff that's both rock solid while pushing boundaries which is exactly what I want from an AI assistant.

It's built around email – I use email a lot less than I used to as we run on Slack, but I still really like email. It's the decentralized platform that works everywhere.

I like some of the stated goals: it's shared (which is how I use Gai Bot), I can forward it emails (like I use Al), and it's self-learning or something and presumably built on top of Pi (like OpenClaw).

Here's the opening of how Lefos describes itself:

So I tried it out. Not for anything serious yet, but just to put it through its paces and for fun. This review covers the things I don't like about it, and which bits I find promising. I probably lean more into the negative side, not because I want to hate on Lefos, but because thinking through this really helped me figure out what I actually want in an AI assistant, and I'm hoping that either

It'll be helpful to the Lefos team if they agree and use my criticisms to improve Lefos

It'll be helpful to me if I decide the only way to get what I want is to build it myself and to evolve some combination of OpenClaw, Gai Bot and Al into Al 2.0.

What is a personal assistant?​

We've kind of had personal assistants since long before LLMs. You can ask Siri the time in London and you might get a helpful answer. At least in 2020, you also might get the answer for the closest London instead of the famous one. John Gruber covered this in 2020 in "What Time Is It In London" and even 6 years later I think his frustrations are still true of many...