The desk companion that never forgets

By: Monica Adjei | October 5, 2026

Pradeep Yellapu is back with a weekend-engineer project he’s been working on and wrote all about on his  Substack.

The problem will be familiar to anyone who uses AI daily: every new chat starts from nothing, so you have to re-explain your life or give it context, including projects, plans, and numbers over and over. Pradeep calls it the “Context Tax.” His fix was a private memory system that lives entirely on his own machine, never touching the cloud, treating life updates like accounting entries: facts are never silently erased, just marked “retired” when something changes, so the record never rots or contradicts itself. In the end, a local agent distills his day into clean facts, but nothing is saved until he approves it.

Then he made it physical. With a $7 microcontroller and a tiny rounded screen, he built “Starboy” — a desk companion that wakes each morning and briefs him on the day ahead, straight from his private ledger. It’s rough by design: loose wires, solder flux, cardboard scraps. However, he didn’t build it as a product, he says, but out of necessity. This is a glimpse of where he thinks computing is heading: ambient, local, and quiet.

Read the full write-up: Substack.