What we did

You started with an empty computer and finished with an agent that lives in a group chat, knows your neighbours, keeps a record in Notion, has a voice of its own, and speaks up on a schedule. Here is how you got there, one lesson at a time.

1. Getting started: the tools

In Getting started, you installed the tools everything else stands on:

• a terminal, to type commands;
• an app store for that terminal: Homebrew, inside Ubuntu on Windows;
• Git, to download NanoClaw;
• Docker, to run Louis inside a closed box, so they can only see what you allow;
• Make and Node.js, to run NanoClaw's short commands, like make add-notion-connection;
• Codex, the AI helper that both thinks for Louis and helps you change them.

What it added: nothing you could talk to yet. Only the ground to build on.

2. Setting up NanoClaw: a phone line and someone to answer it

In Setting up NanoClaw, you made a Telegram bot, downloaded NanoClaw, and ran its setup. Setup connected your ChatGPT plan, installed the credential keeper (OneCLI), made Louis from the community-assistant template, and started NanoClaw in the background.

What it added: Louis, answering you in a private chat. The bot is the phone line. Louis is who picks up.

3. Setting up data sources: a memory you can read

In Setting up data sources, you copied the Louis Notion template, made a Notion connection, gave it access to your copy, and sent Louis the link. Then you told them about yourself, and they wrote it down.

What it added: a data source. Louis now keeps what they learn in your Notion page, where you can read it, and fix it by hand.

4. Customising your agent: a community, not a chat

In Customising your agent, you:

1. made a Telegram group, and added the bot;
2. connected Louis to that group, and watched a Notion round trip;
3. invited a neighbour, and saw that Louis treats a new member, a verified neighbour and an admin differently;
4. changed their personality, and restarted them with make reload-community-agent;
5. scheduled a message every 5 minutes, watched it arrive, and switched it off.

What it added: everything that makes Louis yours: a place to work, rules about who may ask for what, a voice, and a clock.

The pattern behind all of it

Look back at how you changed Louis. Almost every time, you didn't edit a setting. You asked them in plain words, and they changed themselves: they wrote their personality notes, they created their own schedule, they added rows to Notion.

That is the big idea of an agent. The next page shows how it works.

Next

See how the parts work together: How it fits together.