I Built an AI Assistant That Lives in My Telegram — Here's What 6 Months Taught Me

Six months ago I got tired of switching between apps to talk to AI. ChatGPT in the browser. Claude in another tab. Local models in a terminal. It was like having five friends who all live in different cities and refuse to visit each other. So I did what any developer with too many GPUs and too little patience would do: I built my own assistant and put it where I already spend my day — Telegram. It's not a chatbot for customers. It's not a business automation tool. It's just... my assistant. It lives in a private chat on my phone and handles the stuff I used to do manually. Here's what six months of actually using it has looked like. What I Actually Built (And Why Telegram) I already had three machines running Ollama at home — a Mac Mini M4, a Windows PC with an RTX 3060, and an Ubuntu box. Three endpoints, eight models, and me constantly forgetting which model was good for what. Telegram was the obvious choice because: I'm already there all day (friends, family, a few dev groups) It works on my phone, my Mac, and my watch The Bot API is dead simple I can send voice messages, photos, documents — and the bot can handle all of them The setup: a Python bot running on the Mac Mini, connected to all three Ollama endpoints. When I message it, the bot classifies what I want, routes to the right model on the right machine, and replies in the same chat thread. Sounds simple. Took three evenings to get right. Took six months to make actually useful. The Things I Actually Use It For Here's the honest list. Not the marketing pitch — the real daily usage: 1. Quick questions without context switching "Summarize this article" (I paste a link). "Explain this error" (I paste a stack trace). "Rewrite this email less formally." These used to mean opening a browser tab, logging in, maybe hitting a rate limit. Now I just... send a message. The reply comes back in 2-8 seconds depending on which model handles it. The routing is simple but effective: quick chat → small model on the Mac. Cod