Creating Useful Custom Assistants - Claude Code and GitHub is All You Need
When OpenClaw came out last year, I was interested in using it to create a useful personal assistant. I liked the idea of a running agent on my local Mac and being able to message it using messaging platforms like Telegram. I used for a month or so but it never caught on with me. It was kind of buggy and not the most reliable or useful.
Fast forward to June of this year, I was thinking of creating an agent to help us manage our homeschool. There are so many moving pieces in a homeschool:
- curriculum
- plans / pacing
- state standards
Things are pretty dynamic too depending on how the student progresses, often plans need to be updated. I thought AI could somehow help this.
Two weeks ago, I saw YC released qm, yet another agent harness. If 2024 was the year of agent frameworks, then 2025-2026 has been the year of agent frameworks with so many coming out like Pi, OpenCode, Goose, Omnigent, etc. I spent some time research with Fable some options:
I even considered setting up Slack and using Claude Tag given the usefulness of it I’ve seen at work.
In the end I settled on simply:
- Agent Harness: Claude Code
- Knowledge Base: GitHub
It’s been only a couple weeks but it’s been surprisingly useful. Some of the benefits so far:
- My wife and I being on the same page - planning and plans are now documented well and can be read, not just in one person’s brain
- Creating schedules/checklists
- As flexible as we want it to be
- Cataloging / organizing our books at home
- Keep track of: work for each day, books read, etc.
I never imagined needing to teach my wife about GitHub, pull requests and the difference between a model and an agent harness :)
I like Claude Code as the interface because I can interact with my homeschool repo on mobile or desktop. Sessions from mobile are also viewable on the desktop. I don’t have to worry about infrastructure or services dying. I chose GitHub as the knowledge base because I figured Claude Code has been trained to interact with GitHub repos and knows how they operate, there are existing conventions like README.md and pull requests / diffs that can be repurposed for this non-coding use case.
For example this is an example of a query, “Can you give me an overview of this upcoming homeschool week?” And what happens:
- Set up a cloud container
- Cloned repository
- Started Claude Code
- And it proceeds to do the typical (but still surprising and amazing) agentic search by exploring the repo in order to answer the question
I imagine a similar pattern can be done for other use cases like:
- a financial agent
- a trip planning agent
- a generalized personal assistant
- an assistant at work
If you’re interested, this is a Claude Artifact I generated that describes how the homeschool agent operating out of the repo works. You could just point Claude to it to set it up. This is a starter repo that contains a skeleton of files that we use for our homeschool agent. I taught some of my friends over the weekend how to set this up for their homeschools, it’ll be interesting to see whether this type of setup (Claude Code + GitHub) will be manageable for people who are using Claude Code and GitHub for the first time.
Note this solution costs $20/month (Claude Code Pro plan). I was curious about Grokbot from Cursor/SpaceX but had no idea it requires the $259.99/month Ultra plan!
