A personal assistant, on your own hardware

What matters gets through.

Moneypenny is a personal assistant program that lives on your own computers. It reads the day's noise — texts, email, and the voice notes and meeting notes you choose to connect (no microphone of its own, ever) — and turns it into a short stack of decisions only you can make. Everything else it prepares, tracks, or files — and filed never means deleted: anything it sets aside stays on record, one tap from coming back if it guessed wrong.

It watches only the channels you hand it, and your messages stay on your own machines — nothing leaves unless you sign a job, and then only that one errand's details — its dates, names, and the ask itself — go to the AI service carrying it out, never your archive, and never to be sold or shared. Exactly what leaves, and when →

See it work How it works

Fair warning, up front: this is one engineer's personal build — in daily use on his own machines, not a product you can buy yet. Everything here, demo included, runs on sample data. Get told when that changes →

One promise, start to finish

From a loose sentence to a finished job

Picture a Tuesday morning: a call just ended, three threads want replies, and somewhere in there you promised to sort out a flight. Most tools would make that one more item on a list you maintain. Here is what happens instead — step through it.

  1. Listen — a spoken promise ("find me a flight east, hold the best refundable option") is caught from the meeting notes you've connected, the way texts and email are: quietly, on your own computer.
  2. Sort — the loose sentence becomes one tidy card: what was asked, for whom, by when. The rest of the day's noise is filed without reaching you.
  3. Desk — one paper lands on your Desk: the held 9:40 flight, the rejected alternatives, the exact decision needed. Sign it, send it back, or bin it.
  4. Do — signed. The flight is booked, the calendar updated, the confirmation filed.
  5. Prove — a receipt remains: what was asked, what was done, when, and the proof.
The Desk

Your side of it is one desk

Not a status page and not a feed. Work arrives as paper, sits where you put it, and leaves when it's done. The one-decision chores get swiped away one at a time; the longer things wait where you can see them. An empty desk means "already handled."

Four plain moves decide each paper — on a phone, they're swipes: done · swipe right snooze · swipe left delete · swipe down star · swipe up open · tap

On a big screen the same verbs are clicks and drags: tap a paper to open it, drag it to the outbox (done), the tray (snooze), or the trash (delete) — the demo's hint bar shows the mapping.

Try it yourself — the sample demo runs in your browser →

Who it's for

Anyone whose day leaks promises: the parent juggling school threads and appointment reschedules, the founder with forty unanswered messages, the person who says "I'll sort it out tomorrow" on every call. If your follow-ups live in six apps and your own memory, this desk is for you.

Why it isn't another inbox

Four things it does that a to-do app can't

It does the reading so you don't have to

The channels you connect are read continuously, without being asked — so nothing waits for you to notice it.

open

The quiet reader behind this reads each message the moment it lands, works out who it's from and what it wants, and stages the follow-up before you've opened the thread. You see the result, not the reading.

To be exact about "listening": it has no microphone and hears no calls. "Out loud" means the voice memos, dictation, and meeting notes you deliberately plug in — text sources you chose, nothing ambient.

And because it runs on your own hardware, "it reads everything" means your machine reads everything. No one else does.

full story →

One desk, one decision at a time

Every decision comes to the same place, prepared well enough to decide in seconds.

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Before anything reaches your Desk, the safe, reversible work is already done: options compared, a recommendation made, a hold placed without spending money. The paper you get states the exact decision needed — so a swipe or a signature is genuinely enough.

It interrupts you once, with everything attached, instead of ten times with fragments.

full story — try the Desk →

Swap the AI; keep your history

The AI service that carries out the work is a replaceable part. Your work and its history are not.

open

AI services leapfrog each other every few months. Here, whichever one is best right now — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, the same services everyone uses — plugs into the same socket and carries out the work; when a better one ships, it swaps in mid-stream. Your cards, history, and receipts live in your own records, below any of them.

That's the point: continuity for you, not loyalty to a vendor.

full story →

Receipts, not promises

Every finished job leaves a record you can read: what was done, when, and the proof.

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"Done" is a claim, and claims need evidence. When Moneypenny finishes something, it files a receipt — the confirmation number, the sent reply, the updated calendar entry — next to the request that started it. If a job can't show its receipt, it isn't done, and it goes back on the Desk.

The receipts on this site are labeled samples — the real ones stay private, but they're written by the same code and have exactly this shape.

full story →
What "done" looks like

One job, closed, with the receipt

This is the receipt the flight request from the walkthrough leaves behind. It's a sample from the in-browser demo — not a real booking — and it's exactly the shape every real job ends in.

Sample receipt · flights east
askedTue 09:12 · "hold the best refundable option"
preparedTue 09:14 · 3 fares compared · 9:40a held · no charge
signedTue 11:02 · you, from your phone
doneTue 11:03 · booked · calendar updated · $284 refundable
proofconfirmation #QF8M31 · card receipt filed
loop closed in 1h 51m · one interruption · in real use, every line links to the record it names

Every job ends in one of these. The card is yours, saved with the airline — Moneypenny never stores card numbers — and in real use each line is a link to the confirmation it names. The rules that keep receipts honest →

The practical part

What it runs on

Moneypenny is software you install on a computer you own — typically one that stays home and stays on: a desktop, a mini-PC, a home server. That machine does the reading and keeps the records.

You connect the channels you choose. Email works with an ordinary Gmail account (or almost any standard email account — the kind that works in Apple Mail or Outlook). Text messages come in by way of a computer that already receives your texts — today that means an Apple computer signed into your Messages. There is no phone app to install — the Desk opens in any browser, so "signed from your phone" means opening a page and tapping.

Plainly: setting it up today assumes some comfort with computers. A packaged, plug-in version is the roadmap — the email list below is where that gets announced.

Who's behind it

Built by Joe Lanzone, an AI product engineer, as the assistant he actually wanted — and uses every day. This site explains the public side; the working notes live on his own site.

The name is borrowed from Miss Moneypenny, the fictional assistant who quietly kept the office running. This one is a program, not a person — but the job description stood.

Joe's engineering notebook →