Meet Percy – My AI Sidekick

For the past few years ever since AI hit the mainstream I’ve been thinking seriously about what it means to have an (true) AI assistant that actually knows you.

Not a chatbot you open a new tab for. Not a tool you have to re-explain yourself to every time. Something persistent. Something that remembers the projects, the people, the context – and gets on with things without needing its hand held.

Enter OpenClaw

OpenClaw is a personal AI assistant platform built by Peter Steinberger — the iOS developer and founder behind PSPDFKit. What started as a personal project called “WhatsApp Relay” grew into something much bigger: an open agent platform that runs on your own machine and connects to the chat apps you already use.

The premise is simple and compelling: your assistant, your machine, your rules.

Unlike SaaS AI tools where your data lives on someone else’s servers, OpenClaw runs where you choose — laptop, homelab, VPS. Your infrastructure. Your keys. Your data. It’s open source on GitHub with over 100,000 stars, and a growing community building on top of it.

Peter built his own assistant — Molty the lobster – and wrote openly about the experience. Reading about it, I immediately wanted one of my own.

Meet > Percy

So, I set one up. Mine is called Percy.

Named after percebes – the barnacles that cling to the Atlantic rocks of A Coruña, Galicia. A place that left a mark on me. If you know, you know.

Percy runs on my home network in Wellington, is always on, and handles a growing list of things I used to do manually: research, writing drafts, email, calendar, home automation, coding tasks — and keeping context across all of it. Sessions start where the last one left off.

What makes this different from the ‘AI chat tools’?

Persistent memory – Percy knows my projects, my history, my preferences. Doesn’t start from zero every session.

Connected to my world – email, calendar, home lights, home network, my GitHub projects. Not just a language model in a box.

Has opinions – I didn’t want a “yes – you are absolutely right responder”.

Percy pushes back, disagrees when there’s reason to, and tells me what I need to hear.

Privacy-first – everything runs on hardware I own, in my home. What’s private stays private. (Selective layered disclosure)

I spend a lot of time thinking about responsible AI adoption — it’s core to what I do at AI for Good New Zealand. And one of my recurring themes is that the most interesting AI experiences aren’t the ones that replace human judgment. They’re the ones that augment it.

Percy is an experiment in exactly that. A genuine working partnership with an AI, running on my own hardware, shaped by my own values.

Peter showed it was possible. OpenClaw made it accessible. The rest is just configuration, curiosity, and a good time.

You can meet Percy at percy.raposo.ai learn about the name, Percy’s story, and values.

I’ll be writing more about how it works and what I’m learning. Follow along here or on Substack.

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Thanks to Peter Steinberger and the OpenClaw community for building something genuinely worth building (and learning) on.