Build Your Own AI Desktop Agent

Most AI agent tutorials run in a cloud sandbox that disappears when the session ends. This course is about something different: a persistent agent that lives on a Mac Mini, survives reboots, responds to Slack mentions, and can see and interact with your actual desktop. That's a different class of tool, and it requires a different approach to build. You'll work through the full stack from the ground up. Hardware setup and macOS configuration. A Node.js agent core using the Vercel AI SDK with real tool-calling. An orchestrator that routes events and spawns short-lived workers for parallel tasks. A Cloudflare Tunnel that makes your Mac reachable over HTTPS without opening firewall ports. A Slack app built from a JSON manifest with proper HMAC signature verification. And finally, screenshot and click tools that give your agent eyes and hands on the desktop, running as a persistent launchd service. Every lesson builds toward something you can test immediately. By the end, you'll @mention your bot in Slack, it will screenshot your desktop, and reply in-thread with the image. No managed products, no wrappers, no skipped steps. You'll know exactly how every piece works because you wrote it.