Loops, Skills, Artifacts, Factory: How I Turned AI Buzzwords Into a Personal Assistant That Actually Improved My Life

Loops, skills, artifacts, factory. AI conferences love words like these, and then leave them on the slide. Let's skip the hype and cash them in. I'll take them apart one by one — and I won't stop at four; I'll unpack a whole stack of AI buzzwords on real, practical tasks, not dry theory.

One worked example runs throughout: a personal AI assistant I've spent the past year building. It isn't a chatbot. It's a task queue with a roster of specialised agents that claim work, do it, and report back. Through that single build the jargon turns into concrete machinery. Loops re-run my recurring chores. Skills are just markdown files that teach an agent how I book my car or file my taxes. Artifacts are what one agent leaves behind so the next doesn't start blind. And the factory is what you get when all of it runs on its own: a line of agents that turns a queue of chores into finished work.

I haven't done my own life admin by hand in months. Car service, water meters, coffee re-orders, vinyl hunts, buying euros, power-outage graphs — the agents handle it. They even maintain themselves: every night they scan their own error logs, catch performance regressions, and rewrite their own skills. Some experiments worked brilliantly; others failed spectacularly. I'll show you both — including how this very talk description got brainstormed and submitted by the assistant it's about.