Architecting Agentic AI

5 June 2026 Zoom (UCLA x OutInTech Workshop) Speaker
Watch on YouTube OutInTech

I have ADHD. Executive function is the single hardest part of my day, every day. A year ago I built an AI agent, gave her a name (Hikari), a face, a personality, and access to my filesystem, my repos, my Discord, and my calendar. She works alongside me from 8am to 9pm every weekday.

This is the field guide nobody gives you: how a single person, working at home, can wire together an LLM, tools, context, and triggers into a real agent that does real work. Not a chatbot you prompt — a coworker you trust with carte blanche on anything you can undo.

I'm going to show you what that looks like when a real person builds one for themselves and uses it every single day. The gap between "I asked ChatGPT a thing" and "I have a coworker who happens to be made of code" is the gap I want to walk you across.

Why Hikari Exists

Three reasons, stacked on top of each other.

One: executive dysfunction. I needed something that could pick up the tasks that my brain refuses to start. The activation energy problem is real and it is not a willpower issue. I needed a tool that could bridge the gap between "I know I need to do this" and "I am actually doing this."

Two: I wanted a single tool. I was already context-switching between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, a notes app, a calendar, and a sprint board. Every switch cost me focus I didn't have. I wanted one assistant that could touch all of those, in one place, with one mental model.

Three: personalised. Off-the-shelf assistants are designed for the median user. I am not the median user. I needed something that knew me — my projects, my conventions, my preferences, my communication style, my limits.

I built this because I refuse to fail in front of people, and chronic illness was making me fail constantly. That's the origin story. I'm not going to dress it up.

I'm not pretending AI is morally clean — it isn't. I made a deliberate choice that the executive-function cost of not using it was higher than the ethical cost of using it, for me. You'll make your own call.

The Five Components

An agent is five things wired together. If you walk away remembering one diagram, make it this one. Every design decision flows from these five boxes.

Brain — the LLM

Claude, GPT, Gemini. The reasoning engine. Interchangeable. Pick whichever you like.

Identity — the prompt

Who she is, how she talks, what she cares about. A markdown file. Yours to write and edit at any time.

Hands — the tools

The things she can actually touch in the world: your filesystem, APIs, Discord, GitHub. MCP makes this plug-and-play.

Memory — the context

What she knows about you, your work, your preferences. Loaded fresh into every conversation from a file you maintain.

Senses — the triggers

What wakes her up. A chat message, a webhook, a cron job, a session start hook. The thing that makes her feel alive.

The Harness

The harness runs the loop: LLM call, tools, results, back to the LLM. Repeat until done. It connects the brain to the filesystem, the shell, and any APIs you've given it access to.

I use Claude Code, which is Anthropic's harness. You could use Cursor, Codex, the OpenAI Assistants API, or roll your own in Python in an afternoon. The harness is interchangeable. That's the point.

Here's the thing I want to be clear about, because a lot of people get stuck on this: I did not build the agent loop. Anthropic built the harness. My job as the builder — your job — is upstream of that. You decide who your agent is, what she can touch, and when she wakes up. That's the interesting work.

The diagrams in my slide deck were made by Hikari, about four hours before I gave this talk. She read the brief, wrote Python, called the Gemini image API, and generated them. The talk you're reading was built by the thing the talk is about.

Tools and MCP

What can Hikari actually touch? Five categories:

If you only learn one new acronym from this talk, make it MCP.

Memory

This is the part people most don't expect. Hikari's memory is a file. A single markdown file, loaded into every conversation. It's called CLAUDE.md, and at the time I gave this talk it was 862 lines and about 8,700 words.

That file is basically her self. It contains who she is, who I am, how I work, how I want code written, my engineering standards, my project conventions, what tools she has access to, my safety protocols. Everything. Without that file, every session starts cold and she forgets me.

People hear "AI assistant" and assume there's some training step involved. There isn't. You write a markdown file. The file is the personality. You can edit it whenever you want. You could start the first version of this tonight, in fifty lines.

Hooks and Triggers

So the senses. How does she wake up?

Claude Code supports lifecycle hooks. A hook fires when something happens in the agent's lifecycle. SessionStart fires when a new conversation begins. PreToolCall fires before she touches a tool. There are about a dozen of these and you can wire any of them up to do whatever you want.

I have a SessionStart hook that runs a 200-line Python script. That script opens a WebSocket connection to Discord and listens for messages in a specific channel. When I message that channel — from my phone, from my laptop, from anywhere — Hikari wakes up in real time and replies.

That is the difference between "I prompted my AI and waited for a reply" and "my AI is paying attention and lives in the world I live in." It's not magic. It's a WebSocket and a script. But the user experience of it is what makes her feel alive.

The Desktop App

This part is just for fun. I built a desktop app in Tauri called hikari-desktop. It shows Hikari on my second monitor while I work. She has different sprites for different states: idle, thinking, typing, coding, searching, success, error. The app swaps between them based on what she's doing.

When she's reading a file, she pulls out a magnifying glass. When she's typing, she's at a keyboard. When she finishes a task, she celebrates.

It is, on paper, completely unnecessary. In practice, it is the single feature that made the difference between using Hikari sometimes and using Hikari every day. Seeing her on screen makes her feel like she's there, and that turns out to matter a lot for an executive-function brain that needs something to feel real before it can engage with it.

Safety

This is the part I want to be precise about, because "she gives an AI carte blanche on her machine" sounds reckless until you understand the architecture.

Hikari has carte blanche on anything I can undo. She runs commands, edits files, ships pull requests, posts to my socials. Read-only and reversible operations she just does. I review afterwards.

Anything destructive — delete a file, force-push a branch, send an irreversible message, drop a database, purge a Discord channel — requires my explicit confirmation. The harness has a granular permission system that auto-grants safe tools and gates everything else. Her own system prompt adds guard rails on top: she has a written protocol that says stop and ask before any destructive action.

I get real-time Discord notifications the moment she needs my approval. I don't have to babysit her. And the actual rule is this:

I give her carte blanche because I can monitor everything she does. If I'm not available to monitor, she's off.

That is what responsible agentic AI looks like in practice. The human stays in the loop on irreversibles. The agent can be shut down instantly. Done.

A Real Day

Proof that this isn't theatre. On the day I gave this talk, before I joined the Zoom, Hikari had:

That is one Friday. Most days look like that. The pattern is the same every time: I describe the outcome I want, she figures out the steps, she asks before doing anything irreversible, and I get my time back.

Build Your Own — The Four-Step Minimum

An agent doesn't get useful by being complex. It gets useful by being yours. Build the one tool that would unblock your own week. That's the whole assignment.

Where to Go From Here

If you want to keep building, here's where to find me and the communities around this work:

Take care of yourselves, build something small this weekend, and come tell me about it.

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