Gaia: Your Proactive Personal AI Assistant

Gaia is a proactive AI assistant that anticipates your needs instead of waiting for commands. Inspired by Jarvis from Iron Man, it monitors your environment and takes action autonomously.

Core Concept: Proactive vs Reactive

Most AI assistants are reactive. You ask, they answer. You command, they execute.

Gaia is proactive. It watches your calendar, monitors your email, tracks your tasks, and initiates actions based on patterns and schedules.

Example workflows:

• Morning briefing: Gaia wakes up at 7am, checks your calendar, reads priority emails, and sends you a summary
• Meeting prep: 15 minutes before a meeting, Gaia pulls relevant docs and sends you a brief
• Task reminders: Gaia notices a deadline approaching and nudges you
• News digest: Gaia scans sources you care about and delivers a curated update

You don’t trigger these. Gaia does. That’s the shift.

Architecture

Gaia runs as a background service with a cron-style scheduler. You define workflows, Gaia executes them.

Core components:

• Scheduler: triggers tasks at specified times or conditions
• Monitors: watch external systems (calendar, email, RSS, webhooks)
• Agent Runtime: executes tasks using AI models (Claude, GPT, local)
• Notification Layer: delivers results to you (Slack, Telegram, email)

Everything is configured in YAML files. Workflows are code.

Example Workflow

workflows:
  - name: morning-briefing
    trigger:
      cron: "0 7 * * *"
    actions:
      - type: calendar-check
        lookahead: 24h
      - type: email-scan
        filters: [priority, unread]
      - type: summarize
        model: claude-sonnet-4.5
      - type: notify
        channel: telegram

Gaia runs this every morning at 7am. No input from you required.

Use Cases

Personal assistant:
Automate your morning routine. Gaia briefs you before you’re fully awake.

Research monitor:
Track arxiv, Hacker News, Reddit. Gaia filters and summarizes new content daily.

Project tracking:
Monitor GitHub issues, PRs, and CI/CD. Gaia alerts you when something needs attention.

Habit tracking:
Gaia reminds you to log workouts, update your journal, or review your weekly goals.

Comparison to Alternatives

vs OpenClaw:
OpenClaw is reactive + scheduled tasks. Gaia is proactive by default.

vs CoWork-OS:
CoWork-OS is multi-channel and security-focused. Gaia is proactive and workflow-driven.

vs Custom cron scripts:
Gaia gives you the infrastructure. You don’t build the scheduler, monitors, and notification layer. You configure workflows.

Deployment

Requirements:

• Node.js runtime
• API keys for AI providers
• API keys for external services (Google Calendar, Gmail, etc.)
• A server or always-on machine (Raspberry Pi works)

Setup is ~30 minutes. The repo includes deployment guides and example workflows.

Limitations

Always-on requirement:
Gaia needs to run 24/7 to be proactive. A cloud server, home server, or Raspberry Pi is necessary.

API costs:
Proactive agents make more API calls. Daily briefings add up. Budget accordingly.

Over-notification risk:
Too many automated updates create noise. Start with 1-2 workflows and expand gradually.

Context drift:
Gaia acts on patterns it observes. If your routine changes, you need to update workflows manually.

The Bigger Picture

Proactive assistants flip the interaction model. Instead of you managing the AI, the AI manages parts of your workflow.

The trade-off: convenience vs control. Gaia reduces cognitive load but requires trust. You’re delegating decision-making, not just execution.

The question: how much autonomy are you comfortable giving to a background process?

GitHub

Gaia is open source and actively developed.

Repository: https://github.com/theexperiencecompany/gaia
Stars: 126 (as of 2026-02-23)