Comites.ai
Comites.ai is my personal AI agent platform, and it’s where I do my most hands-on work in agentic AI. Comites were the companions who traveled with Roman leaders and advised them — each a master of one thing. Mine are a growth coach, a nutritionist, and a sommelier. Each has one job, keeps a faithful record of it, and lives in Slack, where I can ping them anytime.
I never set out to build a platform. I set out to avoid keeping a journal. What follows is how one accidental agent turned into a council — and how I’ve worked on it, mornings, evenings, and weekends, since the summer of 2025.
Summer 2025 — An Accidental Agent
I was struggling through a moment in my career where I wasn’t getting a ton of external validation, and it led me to realize I was in a fixed mindset. So I reread Carol Dweck’s Mindset, and it recommended the one thing I have never once been able to keep up with: a daily journal. Not surprisingly, I decided the answer was to write software instead. The Growth Coach was born — an agent with a single job, to walk me through a daily growth-mindset practice and keep the notes I would never keep myself. I wrote up the idea, built a low-code version in n8n, and then rebuilt it properly on Google’s Agent Development Kit.
The Idea in Principle · A Low Code Version · The ADK Version
November 2025 — Taking the Coach to Slack
By November the coach was hosted on what was then called Vertex AI Agent Engine (Google has since renamed it the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform), and I had a problem: I wanted to talk to him from my phone, not from a cloud console. So I built the interface between the coach and Slack — a small FastAPI service on Cloud Run that routes each Slack bot to its agent, keeps the session straight in Firestore, and answers asynchronously so Slack doesn’t give up waiting. It was pure plumbing, and it changed everything.
The Realization — One Job, a Faithful Record, Always a Ping Away
I realized the power of the concept as soon as I had it built. An agent with one job, who keeps a faithful record of it, is useful — and in Slack I could ping him anytime. It didn’t feel like a chatbot; it felt like a colleague. I started thinking of new ideas, and the council grew:
Nora the Nutritionist — built for NYC Marathon training, where “eat healthy” isn’t specific enough. She logs a meal from a photo, keeps a shared recipe book with Nicole, and tracks it all through FatSecret. My Comites: Nora the Nutritionist
Sam the Som — my sommelier. She keeps the cellar in four Google Sheets, picks a bottle for tonight, and, handed a photo of a restaurant’s wine list, comes back with candidates grounded in what I’ve actually rated. My Comites: Sam the Sommelier
From an Agent to a Platform — The Forum
Slowly I started realizing there were things every agent needed that none of them should have to build for itself, and I added them to the middleware — which by then had a name, the Forum:
Agent-to-agent communication, so agents can ask each other questions — the piece that turns a collection of agents into a council.
A scheduling service, so agents can act on their own clock. Sam posts a Wine of the Day at 6pm whether or not I ask.
MCP server hosting, so a tool integration like Garmin is built once and available to every agent.
Memory that stays yours. Agents keep their notes in Google Sheets and Docs in your own Drive, and they never write to them without asking.
How I Work On It — A Team of 0.1 FTE
Comites.ai gets built in the gaps — mornings before work, evenings, weekends — which means that when I do get twenty minutes, I can’t afford to spend them remembering where I left off. Not surprisingly, the way I manage it looks a lot like the way I ask large teams to manage agentic delivery at Kyndryl, shrunk down to a team of one:
A clean backlog in Linear, where every story carries enough context that Claude Code can pick it up cold.
Todoist as the single list for my whole life, with Coach Dare syncing the two so that “what’s next” is already decided before I sit down.
Claude Code for most of the coding, and Claude as the strategic conversation partner when I’m thinking through a design.
What’s Next
The council is still growing. A fitness agent built on Garmin data is next, and then letting Nora and the fitness agent talk to each other — which is where the “council” part gets real. And the most interesting comites won’t be mine: if you have a domain you care about and an audience who’d want an agent for it, I’d like to build it with you.