Good Assistant, for turning long-term goals into daily progress | Hacker News Reader

Good Assistant, for turning long-term goals into daily progress

good-assistant.ai

2 pointsjensabacik3 comments

Nice job and congrats on launch. Not sure I get differentiation with codex/chatgpt? I know you said "in practice, you need to instruct the AI to use it" but pretty easy to build an agent to consistently sends me a message etc Lmk what you think

Thanks! The magic is in the implementation. You could replicate many of the features and sometimes get similar result, but in practice it would get too rigid, very expensive and often the result would not be nearly as good.

Memory couldn't be replicated. ChatGPT did a good improvement to long term memory recently, but it's not getting close to Good Assistant. And memory affects every other feature.

Other features like notes & tasks integration, reminders etc. could be replicated with custom setup, the limitation there would be what I talked about in the post - the generic agent does what you tell it to do, nothing more. This means that it can't be "aware" of your context, notes, tasks, goals etc, unless you first ask it to read them, in the beginning of each conversation or in each automation.

Does this make more sense? :-)

This app is my passion project. For a while I had an idea of human-like assistant I would use to bring structure, necessary planning and motivation to me pursuing the goals I had. Things like learning a language and taking my startup to a new phase. It felt like AI is there in terms of capability, but product like ChatGPT went in different direction. Which is good for me because I got excited about building it myself :-)

I started working on Good Assistant in the beginning of 2025, released first version in the beginning of 2026, and working until now to bring it to the level of usefulness I was imagining from the start.

What does it do?

An app with tasks, notes, long term goals, and chat. Your assistant helps you establish concrete plan for pursuing your few selected goals, helps with anything AI can help with, and it's proactive. Every morning it sends you a message with suggested plan for the day which you can adjust and commit to. It's aware of your schedule and work - one of the aims is to help you plan in the way that's not overwhelming, even when tasks piled up. The assistant also sends you a message during the day, from time to time, whenever it's helpful based on the context.

I identified a few areas where current AI apps are lacking, where I thought a much better experience is possible. And developed in that direction. The result is that the assistant is unique in a few ways, better than any AI product I tried.

Interesting bits:

Memory. Chat apps like Claude and ChatGPT are improving, but Good Assistant has the best memory system. There are many constantly maintained layers that make it possible, static and dynamic, and the result is that the interaction feels often closer to talking with human than with an AI. This is also what makes the assistant expensive to run (and costs $29 per month). The rich memory accounts for majority of tokens used and needs background tasks that build up the "static" parts daily. But the result is an assistant that remembers what you mentioned once 1 year ago, naturally, without asking about it.

Integration of tasks, notes, goals, reminders, calendar. These features are already possible to use in your favorite AI, via different MCP connections. The problem is that in practice, you need to instruct the AI to use it. It doesn't naturally read your tasks and notes and uses that knowledge to be more helpful. But Good Assistant does because the integration of these features is woven into the app on all levels.

I welcome you to try your own assistant, there is a 1 week free trial, and tell me what you think about the idea. I am well aware of an AI assistant being already overcrowded space. This one is built to solve one particular problem (making real sustained progress on goals) better than any other tool.

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