Advanced Artificial Intelligence Assistant

14 min readUpdated April 26, 2026

Table of contents

Hardware
Architecture
Install Proxmox

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has become very fashionable, which most people commonly associate with "chat gpt" style apps, however, AI has been with us for a long time, since as a discipline it was established since 1956 and even its roots go back to work from previous years.

Despite the above, it was with the massification of large language models (LLMs), where AI became more relevant to the general public, where even "Chat GPT" became the compendium in superlative terms of what AI is for many.

Now, to no one's surprise, this boom in AI is representing a change in many areas, with special mention to programming, put an end to those days where we posted our code doubts in forums, hoping that among the mountain of insults some good soul would help us.

I personally have used paid subscriptions for a few months and the truth is that it has accelerated my productivity a lot, however not everything is rosy, AI is expensive to execute and needs a gigantic infrastructure to work, in addition our data travels to the servers of the providers we choose (Anthropic, Open AI, etc), so it is not very private, plus subscriptions are becoming more and more expensive as large companies are no longer subsidizing the cost of subscriptions. An example of this is GitHub Copilot, which as of today (April 2026) has stopped supporting Opus models (top model for code) in addition to no longer allowing new users to sign up for the paid plan, other companies are doing similar things by increasing prices and limiting use to all users, something that I understand was unsustainable in the long term and being honest they have already achieved their goal of showing us the potential of these tools in the professional environment.

Here I open a small parenthesis and invite you to reflect on the social gap that this will cause since accessing this tool is becoming very expensive and be careful here not to be confused with free chat plans, since between that and professional tools such as Claude Code there is a world of difference.

Closing the parenthesis and continuing with this project, the objective is detailed below: to build a local AI assistant that is hosted for the most part and then in its entirety on our own infrastructure.

Some use cases are exemplified below:

Enter your home office/studio and have the AI take care of turning on the computer and opening the curtains.
Leaving the house and having the AI call you to let you know that you left the stove on
If you're a programmer, delegate tasks to AI and review your PR when you're done with your work
Get automated reports on your business
Make and make social media posts with trending topics
Dealing with your business's customer service
Disguise your asociality by making it take charge of your messages, etc

Emphasizing the last point, the point has its point, what kind of people would use their valuable time to stress with technology instead of doing normal person things. Anyway, I suppose to restless people.

Hardware

Returning to the project, you need to have hardware, in this case I will use loose components that I had at home, resulting in a computer with these characteristics:

Ryzen 7 5700g
Motherboard A520m
16Gb RAM 3200 Mhz
PSU 500 watts 80+ bronze
Aero One Mini Eclipse Cabinet
TPLink PCIE Network Card
500Gb SATA M.2 SSD

One detail is that, although here I am including a network card, in this specific case I recommend the use of a wired connection, so although I include it I will not use it until medium or long term.

I also do not recommend skimping on the hardware and if it is necessary to make a small investment to obtain better results, that being said with a computer similar to the one described they will already have enough power to run different microservices and even run local inference if a good graphics card is added.

Below is a photograph of the disassembled PC and one of how it was installed next to the modem.

The assembled version has a t-shirt on top, and it's not that I was cold (I think), what happens is that I'm a bit shocking with the noise and I wanted to see if the fans were less audible, it's really almost imperceptible, but the less noise it makes the better for my peace of mind.

Finally, after having the hardware ready, I entered the BIOS to adjust the temperature curve of the fans, make sure it detected the two RAM modules and activate the XMP (Xtreme Memory Profile) profile.

Architecture

At this point I already had a competent machine for this project, however, I paused, although I was already clear about what I want to achieve and where I am going I began to reflect on how I should structure it, I was even researching different approaches to achieve what I am looking for, at the beginning I used YouTube, I saw some guides and examples for the use of tools such as N8N and OpenClaw, Below, I list the links to the videos:

I liked the information and how they explain each concept in a very simple way, although you may not be related to coding you feel that they are talking to you in Chinese. However, to continue with my odyssey it was not enough, the information was very basic and left some issues such as security, connectivity, configurations, price and they did not go too deep into advanced integrations and that is fine so that people who start in this world do not get scared.

I later descended into the abysses of Reddit in search of more knowledge, where I found the following posts:

Once I had enough information I designed my architecture, which I called ADA (Adaptive Digital Architect), is currently a nine-page document and is based on one of the most incredible systems in the known universe, the human body.

It is something that is still constantly evolving and subject to change to ensure the stability of the system. These are also the components and the main structure:

Proxmox
- HAOS
- Ubuntu Server
  - Docker
    - OpenClaw
    - N8N
    - Ollama

Well, although it is a simplistic way to exemplify the architecture for me it is important that you understand some of the main fundamentals behind the choice of these technologies, Proxmox will basically allow us to virtualize different operating systems (OS) and applications, within the same machine, so the computer will not be tied to a single operating system, to make it simple, with Proxmox you could have Windows and Ubuntu on the same computer.

On the other hand, HAOS will be in charge of controlling home automation (lights, sensors, smart devices in broad strokes), Ubuntu Server is an operating system for servers and will be in charge of containing docker, each instance of docker will run different microservices.

As an interesting fact, Ubuntu Server and Proxmox share the similarity that both are based on the Linux kernel so we can use Ubuntu Server through LXC which is more efficient than creating a Virtual Machine (VM), therefore, LXC will be used to group the microservices by type (e.g.: AI, multimedia, entertainment, etc.) and within those instances with Ubuntu Server we will have Docker containers isolating the services of the same type so that they do not collide with each other.

Install Proxmox

The first step, as the title of this section says, is to install Proxmox, for this I share the download link:

Download Proxmox software, datasheets, agreements

Once downloaded you must create a bootable drive, for this the easiest thing is to use a USB and boot it with Rufus, there are several tutorials online so I will not go into it in depth, the only thing I would like to add is that if you decide to carry out the process, at the end of it your computer will detect the USB as if they were two storage drives, don't worry, it's normal, just eject the USB and if you did it right you can upload Proxmox to your server.

Turning a 15-minute task into a two-hour one

The installation is quite simple, in my case by connecting the USB and turning on the server it allowed me to start the installation process, however something to take into account is to have the equipment connected to your network through cable to perform the configuration of the IP address, in my case all my connection was wireless, So I had to take the server to where the modem is, unfortunately for me, I only have clothes and a couple of books there, so I had to move several things from my office to the modem and luckily for me all my cables were tied up so I had to make a revolution in the office just to remove the monitor. Here's a list of all the things it occupies:

Server (obviously, but I wanted to emphasize it)
Ethernet cable
Wired Mause
Wired keyboard
Monitor
Extension
Booted USB

Here's what my makeshift installation looked like:

That day it was already late and when I was moving what I needed it started to drizzle, but even so I had no problems in carrying out the installation of the hardware and software successfully.

Installation Process

This part is simpler than it seems, the installation is divided into the following steps:

1.- Select installation mode, everything leads us to the same path, in this case I chose Install Proxmox VE (Graphical) since I was able to carry out the rest of the process from a graphical interface.

2.- Accept the license agreement, just click I agree.

3.- Select the storage drive where we will install Proxmox, in my case a 512Gb SATA SSD

4.- Set your country, time zone, and language, in my case I tend to use everything in English (computer, cell phone, watch, etc.), however, in things that are new to me, as was the case with Proxmox I usually use Spanish to familiarize myself faster and later I change it to English.

5.- Enter password and email, here I paid special attention to the password, as it is needed to access either locally or remotely, so it is important not to forget it.

6.- Configure IP address, if we have used wired connection Proxmox fills in the information, so I just checked that it detected my network card and modified the field Hostname (FQDN), I placed something like proyecto.local, I also changed the last value of IP Address (CIDR), making it easier to remember.

7.- Proxmox shows an overview of all configurations, once I verified that everything is correct start the installation, the process lasted relatively little and after a while the server restarted, at that moment I removed the USB drive and when I turned on I already had a server with Proxmox ready to use.

Starting off on the wrong foot

To be honest, this is not something I'm proud of. The day after installing Proxmox, I broke it. I wanted to remove a UI warning, but the command I ran accidentally replaced several lines in proxmoxlib.js with the expression 'data.status !== Active'. I was in trouble because I had not backed up the file, and I could not update the system because I had not configured the package repository.

Regarding the command, I do not share it so as not to be judged and because surely there will be no lack of absent-minded men or women who copy and paste, just as it happened to me in high school that when I passed the assignments they copied even my name.

So I had a broken UI and what surely many would have done is reinstall, but I was not willing to make another revolution in my office, so I searched in the Proxmox files and found the mimified version of the file that I had broken, I replaced it and with it the UI came back to life, After deleting the enterprise repositories that were blocking downloads, I proceeded to update and install Proxmox-Widget-Toolkit and in this way I returned to the file proxmoxlib.js its original version.

This reminds me of my first PC, a Windows laptop that my parents bought me 10 years ago and that I use today as an Octoprint server with Ubuntu, the point is that, a week after premiering it, I had to take it to a technician because it had broken the system, it is already like a rite of passage for me.

I will update the post, as it progresses, we are up to date at the moment...

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