I’m building my own n8n AI assistant. A tiny J.A.R.V.I.S.

Pavlo Chorniy — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 03:53:28 +0000

Yes, as everyone else in 2025… Yes, another OpenAI wrapper… But I am building it for myself to solve a real small problem, so why not.

Originally published at: https://pavlochorniy.com/im-building-my-own-n8n-ai-assistant-a-tiny-j-a-r-v-i-s

I don't want to switch between tools, dashboards, boards, and tabs just to figure out what’s going on.

So I’m building something that helps me think - and keeps me updated without asking.

Not a bot that runs commands. Not another productivity system. Just a simple Telegram assistant that knows what’s happening in my projects and brain.

At some point I want it to know everything about my life. But I’m starting small. One problem. MVP.

What I want it to do (for now)

I want to message it in Telegram - text or voice - and get real answers based on my notes, tasks, and commits.
It should be able to read from both Trello boards (two separate projects).
It should read Git logs and help me see who’s doing what and when.

Use cases I want to solve

Who actually moved the X project forward this week? Not based on how many commits, but how much real work was done.
What progress did we make in the last 7 days? I don’t want a list of tasks like “fixed button padding.” I want something like: Module 1 done, Module 2 in progress, Module 3 wrapping up.
How efficient are we right now? Are we faster than last week or slower? What changed?

Potentially, I want this thing to send me messages like:

“Hey, James only pushed 50 lines of text changes in 3 days. Maybe check in.”

What I already have

Obsidian vault with project descriptions, ideas, requirements
Trello boards for 2 dev projects
Git repos for both, full commit history

That’s enough to start.

Why I’m not using some existing SaaS

Because I like struggling with APIs and DevOps - it trains my brain.
Because I am exploring what is n8n and prefer practice.
Because I want full control + self-hosted privacy.

How it’s going to work

The Telegram assistant is the front door. I just send a message - voice or text - and it starts pulling context from all the sources I care about.

This is the high-level system:

Here’s what happens:

Obsidian holds most of my ideas, project descriptions, and random thoughts. It’s where everything starts.
Trello X and Y are two separate boards for two projects. They’re synced into a shared Trello parser that helps track live task status.
Git repositories store commit history. I want to extract real developer activity from these - not just who pushed, but what actually got done.
All this goes into a Processor - which is a simple backend flow, powered by OpenAI API, that cleans the data and generates a response.
The result goes back to me in Telegram - clean, readable, and ideally helpful.

I’ll build the first prototype in n8n. I’m using it because it’s visual, flexible, and great for quick iteration - and I want to get better at it.

What’s going to be tricky

Let’s be real - this isn’t just plug and play. Here’s what I already expect to be a pain:

Getting Obsidian data into the flow

My notes live locally. No API. So I’ll either have to sync to a folder n8n can read from, or just push everything to Git regularly. Not ideal, but workable.

Git logs are messy

Raw commits aren’t readable. I’ll need to clean them up, extract meaningful actions, maybe group them by feature or module. Otherwise it’s just noise.

Scaling

I want this to become a proper assistant. But if I try to make it perfect from day one, I’ll never ship. So v1 will be rough - and that’s fine.

What’s next

I’ll start building the MVP in n8n this week.

First thing I want: ask the assistant what progress we made on a project - and get back a human answer I can actually use.

Once that works (or breaks), I’ll write a follow-up with real outputs, issues, and what surprised me along the way.

If you’re into building personal tools, or just curious how this plays out -

you can subscribe to this blog to get updates when the next post drops.

That’s it for now.

DEV Community: Pavlo Chorniy