Claudius Secretary

Personal-assistant system built on Claude Code — and a live study in where an agent's autonomy should end.

Problem

• I got tired of being a poor secretary to myself.
• The interesting design work all lives in the boundaries: which decisions the assistant makes autonomously, which it proposes, and which it never touches.

Approach

• Draft, never send — there is no send path; drafting is reversible, sending is not.
• Propose first, one action at a time — an ambiguous answer is not approval.
• A vocabulary that cannot lie: it says drafted, prepped, reminder set, armed — never sent, booked, done.
• The actor never grades its own work — a separate morning verifier checks real-world evidence before anything is marked done.
• Anything that notifies another person needs explicit per-item confirmation.

Outcome

• Each rule exists because the version without it made a mess I had to clean up.
• Autonomy boundaries are a product surface, and the cheapest place to learn that is on an agent whose only user is you.