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Case study · Built in-house
Flow: a personal AI agent you can text on WhatsApp
Flow is the AI agent we run for ourselves. We talk to it the way we'd message a colleague, with a WhatsApp text or a voice note. It researches, browses the web, and hands coding work to an AI coding agent, including updating a live website from a single message.
- Text or voice notes, with iMessage also supported
- Private
- Conversations stay with us, not in a shared chatbot app
- Allowlist
- Only approved numbers can talk to it, and others are ignored
- Approvals
- It asks before payments and other sensitive actions
Context
Why we built it
Most AI assistants live in a browser tab. You copy things in, copy answers out, and then still do the work yourself. We wanted an assistant that sits where we already talk, in our messages, and actually finishes tasks.
We also wanted it private and tightly controlled: only approved people can talk to it, and it can only touch the tools we've explicitly given it.
Features
What it does
Chat-first, voice-friendly
- A dedicated WhatsApp number, so it works on any phone with no app to install
- Voice notes work just like text, with the language detected automatically
- Photos and documents sent in chat can be passed to tasks
Website updates from a text
- “Add this event to the site” becomes a real code change, made by an AI coding agent
- The change is committed and deployed to a preview link first
- It goes live only after the person who asked replies “go live”
Research and browsing
- Searches the web and reads pages to answer questions with sources
- Drives a real browser to compare products and fill in forms
- Payments always need explicit confirmation
Guardrails by default
- Only allowlisted phone numbers get a response
- Manual approval mode for risky actions, plus personal-data redaction
- The coding agent works with tightly limited permissions
- No new outside services are connected without the owner's sign-off
In use
How we use it
- 1
“Add Saturday's event to the website.” A preview link comes back in the chat. Reply “go live” and it's published.
- 2
A bug report sent by text. The fix is made and committed, and Flow replies with what changed.
- 3
A voice note asking to compare a few products. It browses, compares and replies with a short list, and nothing is bought without a yes.
What this means for your business
The same pattern works for a team or for customers: an assistant people can simply text, connected to your real systems, that asks before doing anything it shouldn't. Typical first-week builds: a WhatsApp assistant that answers from your docs and books appointments, an internal agent that updates your website, CRM or inventory from a chat message, or a voice-note-to-task flow for field crews.