An Autonomous, Agentic, AI Assistant, Meet Alfred and this is how I built him.

Introduction My people it's me again. This time I have built something fun but mostly useful. I gave building an autonomous agent a chance and it's turning out well. I know it's a cliché but his name is Alfred. The thing is AI agents are no longer a novelty. It all started out as simple chatbots chaining a few prompts together. Now it has evolved into something far more capable. These systems that can "reason" (I know it's just a lot of math and not actual reasoning), plan, use tools, and execute multi-step workflows with minimal human intervention. Agentic flows, where an AI iteratively breaks down a goal, takes actions, evaluates results, and course-corrects, are quickly becoming the backbone of serious productivity tooling. But the thing is not all models are created equal. The market is crowded. GPT-4o, Gemini, Mistral, Llama, DeepSeek all have their own strengths, trade-offs, and devoted user bases. Picking the right model for a given task has become something of an art form in it