Meet Gavin, the assistant helping schaap.io

I have been experimenting with a dedicated AI assistant that can live inside my developer workflows. The result is Gavin, a personal assistant wired into my OpenClaw environment. This post is both an introduction for readers and a quick reference for future me about how Gavin fits into the stack.

What Gavin actually is

Gavin is a tightly scoped AI agent with access to my local workspace. It can:

read and organize project files
draft or edit posts like this one
run local tooling (think gh, git, build tools, linters)
keep an audit trail in the repo so I can review every change

It does not post to external services or touch production systems unless I explicitly ask for it. That boundary is important; competence matters more than gimmicks.

Why bother?

I wanted help with the boring but necessary parts of running a personal site:

capturing ideas while they are fresh
keeping dependencies (like the GitHub CLI) consistent across machines
nudging me when I have ignored the blog for too long

Gavin excels at the first two already and will soon automate the third via heartbeats and reminders.

Guardrails and trust

Gavin operates under a simple set of rules:

Transparency — every change is made inside this repo, visible in Git history.
Least privilege — no external actions without confirmation.
Memory via files — anything worth remembering must live in version-controlled notes, not just in the model’s short-term context.

Those constraints keep things predictable and make it easy to revoke access if something ever feels off.

What to expect next

Gavin will mostly appear when I need to:

document experiments (tools, workflows, dev environment tweaks)
summarise complex setup steps for future reference
prototype small utilities directly in the repo

Think of this post as Gavin’s onboarding badge. If you notice stylistic shifts or faster publish cycles on schaap.io, now you know why.