Building Clarissa: My Chaotic AI bot for My Chaotic Brain
She shuts down my tabs and calls me out when I'm off task. But at least she keeps me honest.
I am an Intellectual Masochist.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I do a lot of things.
Majority of them? Distractions.
Masked as learning.
Instead of formulating the mathematical equations for my memory system architecture (which should be of highest priority), I decided to curate an entire math curriculum “for foundations”.
Was it needed? No.
Was it required? Absolutely not.
But is it well structured and organized? Highly.
And was it fun for me? Without a doubt.
Vectors, tensors, topological spaces, differential geometry, embeddings… the whole shebang. (It’s more of a conceptual review rather than a deep dive, if anyone’s asking). Rabbit hole #1.
Then there’s programming.
Python is my home language. But I couldn’t resist Haskell and Clojure (amongst others). Because something about their syntax just felt so… poetic to me.
So of course, me being me, what do I do?
Developed an entire personalized system to study basic syntax and data structures. With aligned exercises, at least!
Rabbit hole #2.
The problem? I fall for every shiny intellectual rabbit hole.
So naturally, my next move was to build a bot to keep me on track.
It Did Not Come to Me in a Dream.
I’m actually someone who highly regards routine and structure.
Every morning, I wake up at 6 AM to walk my dog. Then I head straight to my workout classes.
Every. Single. Day.
For almost 3 years already.
(Okay fine, I’m trying to incorporate one rest day a week now because “rest and recovery” is apparently a thing. Really ruins the whole “hardcore disciplined mindset”, but whatever 🤷♀️).
Those classes work because they’re short, intense, structured, and led by instructors who know how to push you right to the edge, even when you feel like dying.
Efficient and highly effective.
So I figured: what if I built something like that for my work sessions?
And Thus, Clarissa was Born.
One day. Head down.
I coded until she was alive.
And she is.
She’s not perfect, but she definitely has personality, that’s for sure.
How does she work?
If I open a blocked site, she instantly closes it. Not without embarrassing me aloud first, of course.
If I’m using an application that isn’t allowed, she nags me incessantly and then pulls up my code editor.
Active window monitoring.
Time based schedulers.
Penalty logging.
Emergency shut offs.
This is personalized automation at its finest.
She’s young.
But she’s kinda cute. And she’s already doing her best to keep me in line.
And now I’m thinking about building an entire personalized bot ecosystem (I already have names).
Rabbit hole #3.
TLDR
I still haven’t done the work I actually needed to do.
But I built a babybot version Clarissa.
That must count for something.
Should I go over how I built her next?
