about
Yaad (یاد, "memory" in Urdu) is a personal assistant that lives in WhatsApp. One interface for things that would otherwise be scattered across apps.
how it works
- 1. Message the bot on WhatsApp
- 2. Send links, PDFs, voice notes, todos, questions
- 3. It processes, saves, and remembers
Reply to any message to continue that thread. Everything stays in your chat history.
what it replaces
- Bookmarking apps (Pinboard, Pocket)
- Simple notes (Keep, quick Obsidian entries)
- Todo lists (Wunderlist RIP, MS Todo, Google Tasks)
- Book/movie tracking with tags (#toread, #towatch)
- RSS reading (subscribes, reads, sends daily summary)
- Calendar lookups (easier than opening Google Cal)
- School bus tracker (too much friction to open an app)
- Voice notes → send a rambling voice note, it's parsed and useful info stored
stack
Built on the Anthropic Agent SDK. Tried Gemini, GLM-4.7, MiniMax 2.1 — all good for coding, but for agentic use (understanding human intent, tool orchestration, pithy summaries) Opus and Sonnet are in a different league. The SDK is doing something magical.
Gemini 2.0 Flash handles transcription, images, documents — great for that. Exa for web search. FastAPI + SQLite.
I like Vercel's AI SDK, but nobody can compete with Claude Code right now.
The SDK (Claude Code under the hood) is doing something magical. Boris is summoning AGI in the effort to do less and less work by making Claude Code do more and more work.
Special shoutout to Google ADK and Gemini 2.0 Pro for being not fit for purpose. Follow Boris's tweets and Claude Code's changelog — join the future.
honest note
This is a nice interface to paid AI services. The underlying APIs cost money per use. A personal project, not a product.
Using APIs directly costs more than paying $20/month. Big AI is subsidizing subscriptions and charging an arm and a leg for API access. The Anthropic SDK sadly can't use my subscription, so I pay per token.
faq
why whatsapp?
Too much of life already happens there — PDFs from kids' school, links shared by friends, suggestions from family. It's already open. The share sheet makes it easy to send anything. Voice notes when typing is too slow.
is it useful?
Surprisingly, yes. It also maintains a memory of core facts plus a stream of what's happened. Gets more useful as you use it.
can I try it?
Very limited beta. Anthropic models are excellent but expensive. I'm trialing Kimi 2.5 and others to see if there's a workable model.
My litmus test: am I finding it useful enough to keep paying the API costs? Videos, podcasts, big PDFs — they parse well but add up. Your $20/month Claude or Gemini subscription does most of this anyway. Still finding the balance between what this should do vs what the AI apps already handle.
architecture
The bot is decoupled from the messaging interface. WhatsApp today, but the project will end up with multiple useful ways to get a message to and from it.
coming soon
- Telegram interface
- Email reading (not replying — just surfacing anything useful)
- Better search — every interaction already includes internal + external search, but needs more work
- "Ask about my links" — RAG over your saved content. "What do I know about AI?" → synthesizes from your saves
- Web interface for memories, stream, and links
why a chatbot?
The current AI chat paradigm is useful but high friction. Open app, scroll, find context, type, wait. Pain to search old conversations.
Messaging is simple. I can scroll super fast to anything, forward anything easily, and my defaults are baked in. Send an image → it automagically does the thing. Gemini just glares at the image like a dummy. A super smart dummy that can read the image 10 ways to kingdom come. But my agent has direction. Extracts meaning and actions it.
Over the years, like every programmer, I've dabbled with chatbots. What made them hard was: how do you transform language into function calls? How do you chain tools? LLMs make this ridiculously easy now.
Chatbots are finally possible. Actually, let's not call them chatbots — they're way past that. I expect the big AI guns will roll out the super assistant for your life soon. The sci-fi future is here.
botlers for hire
Have you seen OpenClaw?
moltbot — This is too much. If you're reading this far, you're probably hardcore enough to buy a Mac mini and install OpenClaw. Don't pass Go, proceed straight to moltbook.com.