How I Got an AI Assistant to Do the Work I Hate and Keep Me on Task, for $20 a Month
My AI assistant runs my mornings, drafts in my voice, and costs about $20 a month. I can’t code. I’m teaching how I built it, live this Saturday.
Before I was awake this morning, my autonomous AI assistant had already gone through my day and sorted it.
The three things that actually needed me, pulled to the top. The two people I owed a reply to, flagged. A first draft of the post I’d been putting off, written and waiting. A reminder about something I’d promised my son Jack, because I mentioned it once and it doesn’t let things like that drop.
I didn’t open a single app to make that happen. I set my assistant up once, months ago, told it how I work and what I care about, and it has run a version of this every morning since. It lives on the $20 ChatGPT plan most people use to ask one-off questions. I can’t code. I never touched it this morning.
It does the rest of the unglamorous work too. It keeps a dashboard of my business numbers so I stop opening five tabs to find one figure. It plans my meals (I eat carnivore, it knows that, I never re-explain it). It drafts my Substack notes in my own voice. None of it is exciting. All of it used to live on my plate.
Why your AI keeps disappointing you
You are its memory. That’s the whole problem.
You brief it on who you are and what you need, it helps, you close the window, and it forgets all of it. Tomorrow you do the briefing again. And the day after that. You’re carrying the thread from one session to the next by hand, forever, because the tool can’t hold it for you. So every conversation starts at zero, and you never get to build on the last one.
An assistant that remembers ends that. It keeps your context across days, so the work compounds instead of resetting every morning. Once that’s true, the dashboard and the morning briefing aren’t something you rebuild every day. You set them up once and they just run on schedule. You stop being the one who has to remember to make them happen.
The line I won’t cross
I don’t hand it everything. Anything that needs real discernment stays with me, and nothing it writes goes out before I’ve read it. It can draft, sort, and remind. It doesn’t get the final say, and it doesn’t speak for me. So I read everything it produces. That part stays mine.
From a thousand dollars to twenty
The strange part is the price. Earlier this year I built my first version of this, got obsessed with it (I do that), and at its peak it cost me around $1,000 a month. It also broke about every other day (if you want to read about that whole journey, I wrote it up in detail here). What runs my mornings now does more, for around $20 a month. From a thousand dollars to twenty in a few months, and the cheap one is the one that actually holds up.
That is the shift hiding in plain sight. The thing that used to take real money now sits on a subscription you may already have open in another tab. Almost no one is using it this way, because no one has shown them how.
This Saturday, live
That’s what I’m teaching Saturday. Ninety minutes, live. I’ll show you my own assistant running, then walk you through building yours on the $20 plan you might already have: the pieces that let it remember you and run on schedule, the first jobs worth handing off, and how to keep it from going rogue. You’ll leave with the actual setup path, even if you’ve never built anything technical.
Saturday, June 6 · 6pm PT / 9pm ET
(Sunday, June 7 · 9am AWST/AEST)
$24, replay included.
Everyone who registers gets the replay, so you’ll have the teaching either way. The one thing only the live session gives you is the chance to ask your own questions and get answers in real time.
Right now you’re the one going through your day by hand. Spend ninety minutes with me and you won’t have to be.
Save your seat: https://agent.aiwithleah.com/