My Agent Stack For Automating My Personal Life — Nicolas Bustamante<br>My Agent Stack For Automating My Personal Life<br>2026-05-30 · 10 min read<br>My agent manages my emails, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram and pretty much everything to automate my personal life.

People keep asking me how I use agents in real life. I mean the actual boring things that make a day disappear: reading WhatsApp and Telegram, finding someone's email, searching the web, drafting the intro, updating a document in Google Drive, creating a calendar event, checking who still needs an answer, and doing all of it across the same messy tools I already use.

My answer is disappointingly simple. I use Codex as an operator on top of my actual life data. It has tools. It has data connectors. It has skills. It has a source of truth. It has enough permissions to act locally, and enough approval gates that it does not embarrass me in public.

That is basically the setup. Tools, data connectors, skills, and taste.

I used to do more of this in Claude Code but I have been moving the setup to Codex because GPT-5.5 is currently a better model for this kind of work. The switch from Claude Code to Codex is not really the story. The story is that once a model is good enough, the real leverage comes from wiring it into the world you already live in.

MY PERSONAL AGENT STACK

agent:<br>Codex

tools:<br>Gmail / Drive / Calendar / Docs / Sheets -> gog<br>WhatsApp -> wacli<br>Telegram -> Telegram connector<br>iMessage / SMS -> imsg<br>Browser / Chrome -> browser automation<br>macOS apps -> AppleScript / UI automation<br>local files -> filesystem tools

data:<br>Google Drive as source of truth<br>contacts in a Google Sheet mirrored as CSV<br>Notion exported into Drive<br>local memories and instructions

skills:<br>inbox-zero<br>contacts<br>google-workspace<br>imessage-cli<br>personal admin workflows

The important part is that the agent can move across boundaries. My personal life is not in one app. It is split between Gmail, WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Google Drive, Calendar, Notion, local files, random PDFs, browser sessions, and a contacts spreadsheet that is much more valuable than it looks.

A Real Communication Example

A few days ago a friend sent me a WhatsApp message. She was helping a fast-growing San Francisco AI startup recruit in France and wanted to connect their recruiting manager with a recruiter I know. I did not remember the recruiter's email. I did not know the latest funding news about the startup. I needed to search WhatsApp, search Gmail, find the recruiter's email, search the web, understand why the startup was credible, draft an intro email, include the two job links, show the draft to me, send the email after approval, and then text my friend that it was done.

That is normally twenty minutes of annoying app switching. WhatsApp to Gmail to Google search to Gmail again to WhatsApp again. It is not hard work, but it is exactly the kind of work that burns attention because every step is a small context switch.

With the agent, I asked for the outcome. It read the WhatsApp thread, searched Gmail for the recruiter's email, researched the startup's funding and recent news on the web, drafted the intro, waited for my approval, sent the email, and then texted my friend that the intro was done. The user-facing part took about ten seconds. The agent did the glue work (in seconds!)

This is the killer pattern. The agent is not "answering a question." It is operating across my tools to complete a small real-world workflow (aka a "job-to-be-done")

The License Plate Example

Another example is even more boring, which is why I like it. I got a new license plate for my car. I sent photos and context to Codex. It updated the car information Markdown file I keep in Google Drive, changed the license plate, added the registration notes, preserved the existing VIN, insurance, owners, and address, then uploaded the file back to Drive.

That alone is useful, but the better version is what happens next. The agent can use browser automation to go update the same information everywhere else: FasTrak, the parking app, insurance portals, DMV-related forms, or any other web app that does not have a clean API. For clean systems, it should use an API or CLI. For messy systems, it can use the browser and it's so good! I also now use Computer Use from Codex.

This is what personal agents are for. Not dramatic autonomy. Administrative continuity. I was always afraid of Openclaw yolo mode in the background. I appreciate being in control.

Google Drive Is My Source Of Truth

The most important architectural decision I made was centralizing valuable personal information in Google Drive. For years, a lot of my knowledge lived in Notion. I like Notion as a human workspace, but I do not love it as the primary source of truth for an agent. The API works, but the workspace is too fluid: nested pages, databases, properties, permissions, formatting, backlinks, and a lot of UI-native structure that is pleasant for humans and annoying for...