The Butler Who Arrived Unannounced
The dedicated SIM hadn't arrived yet, so I used my own personal number for testing.
This seemed fine in theory. I'd register the WhatsApp butler on my number, send it a few messages, confirm everything was working. Then when the SIM came, I'd switch it over. Clean, logical, no drama.
What I hadn't fully thought through was that my wife texts me on that number.
A few days into testing, she was going about her morning — talking to me, as far as she knew, about courses my son should look into. The butler, seeing messages arrive on "Vincent's number," did exactly what it was built to do. It replied. Helpfully. With bullet points.
The butler offered to create a reminder task. It asked clarifying questions. It told her it couldn't print physical documents but could help her find things in the family archive.
She didn't notice immediately. Neither did I.
My wife, somewhere between confused and amused, eventually asked: "where are you using your AI from?"
Then it clicked.
"huh? u mean AI help u reply to me?"
And the butler, with complete sincerity: "Yes, I'm the family AI assistant! I help you with tasks, documents, and photos directly via WhatsApp. No human in between."
Her response: "no wonder I catch No Ball."
Which in Singapore English means: no wonder I was completely lost.
How we got here
Post 6 ended on a question: where does something actually get opened without being asked?
The answer, when I stopped adding features and started thinking about behaviour, was obvious. WhatsApp. Not a new app that competes with WhatsApp — WhatsApp itself. A number they could text that happened to be connected to everything I'd built. No new account. No interface to learn. No explaining what a Cloudflare tunnel is.
Getting there required one wrong turn first. Initial research pointed toward the official WhatsApp Business API — Meta's approved route, which involves approval processes, business accounts, and paying per message. Reasonable if you're a company. Absurd for three people who live in the same house.
Evolution API exists in that gap. Open source, self-hosted, connects a regular WhatsApp number to a webhook with no Meta involvement. The unofficial path, as it turned out, was just the sensible one.
Meet Jimi
Every system needs a name, and the butler got one during a stretch when I needed reasons to feel good about what I was building.
The wind-down was grinding. Creditors, lawyers, the forklift still unsold, a court hearing on the calendar. In the middle of all that I was building this — a WhatsApp assistant for my family. I was also typing "WhatsApp butler" into chat windows so many times a day that a nickname became inevitable.
So I named him Jimi. Short for Joy in my Implementation.
Not a technical reason. Not a reference to anything. Just: I needed something that felt like mine, something that carried a little lightness in a period that didn't have much. Jimi was the thing I was quietly proud of when everything else felt like it was being dismantled.
The resemblance to Kimi — the AI model we were using at the time — was noticed later and is entirely coincidental. Kimi was always going to be replaced eventually; LiteLLM sits in the middle now and the model behind Jimi has already changed more than once. The name stayed.
The one thing he still can't do
Every conversation with Jimi starts fresh.
You could tell him something on Monday — a preference, a plan, something in progress — ask about it on Thursday, and he'd have no idea what you were referring to. Polite. Capable. No continuity whatsoever.
A butler who forgets every conversation the moment it ends is better than no butler. But it's not quite right. Memory is what turns a capable tool into something that actually knows you. And building that turned out to be a more interesting problem than I expected.
Next: What it took to give Jimi a memory — and what I noticed about forgetting along the way.