There’s a question I get asked a lot since people found out what I’m running at home: “How do I even start with this stuff?” And my honest answer is usually some version of “well, it depends on what you want it to do, and how much you’re willing to break things along the way, and honestly it took me months of trial and error before anything actually stuck…”
Which is a terrible answer. True, but terrible. Not everyone wants to spend months breaking things.
David Sparks just released the Robot Assistant Field Guide, and it’s the resource I wish I’d had when I started. Not because it covers what I’m doing now—my setup went off the rails a long time ago. But because it solves the actual hard part: going from “this is interesting” to “this is actually useful” without the months of trial and error in between.
What it teaches
You build a personal AI assistant using Obsidian and Claude. Two tools. Obsidian stores everything as plain text files on your computer. Your notes, tasks, projects, calendar. Claude reads and writes those files. Together they become something neither can be alone: an assistant that remembers your life.
The guide walks you through building “skills”, persistent instruction sets that tell your assistant how to handle specific things. Morning briefings. Email triage. Project tracking. Filing. The stuff that eats your day before you get to the actual work.
If you’ve used AI before and thought “this is neat but it keeps forgetting everything,” that’s the problem this solves. A chatbot forgets. An assistant remembers, because the files are right there on your disk.
Why I’m recommending it
I know David Sparks from the Mac Power Users podcast. He’s been teaching automation and productivity on Apple platforms for years. He’s one of those people who actually uses what he talks about, and it shows.
David built a 24/7 AI assistant himself. Ran it on a Mac mini. It answered support emails, sent invoices, transcribed podcasts. Then he shut it down because the security wasn’t there yet. He wrote about the whole thing on his blog. It’s worth reading.
He built the dream, found the problems, and then built a safe version that regular people can use. That’s not theory. That’s someone who burned his own hand on the stove and is now showing you how to cook without the bandages.
I’ve gone way beyond what this guide covers. Multiple agents with different personalities, cross-agent handoff protocols, automated delivery pipelines, a custom issue tracker. Months to build. Lots of broken things along the way. That’s a whole separate blog series.
You don’t need any of that to start. You need Obsidian (free), Claude (subscription), and someone to show you how to connect them.
The live workshops
$199 is real money, and here’s something that makes it easier to stomach: David runs live workshop sessions every Thursday. They’re recorded if you can’t make it, but showing up means you can ask questions and watch him work through problems in real time. Most online courses are “here’s a video, good luck.” This isn’t that.
The workshops are running now. They won’t be forever. If you’re on the fence, sign up while they’re still live.
The price question
If this saves you one hour per week—one hour of the email sorting, task reorganizing, filing busywork that steals time from your actual job—it pays for itself in about four months.
The first skill I built with Claude took a task that used to eat two hours and turned it into fifteen minutes. If you’re anything like me, the return is faster than four months.
Your time is the expensive part. The course is cheap by comparison.
Who this isn’t for
If you’re already deep into agent architectures, multi-agent orchestration, and MCPs, you’ll probably find the early videos basic. You might pick up a few workflow ideas. I did. But you’re not the audience this was built for.
This is for the person who’s curious about AI assistants but hasn’t figured out how to make one stick. The one who keeps starting over because the chatbot forgot everything. The bridge from “interesting toy” to “useful tool” is right here.
That’s an affiliate link. I get a cut if you buy through it. I’d recommend the course either way. I don’t do affiliate deals for things I don’t actually use.