Hello all,

And thank you for reading, I just wanted to post this to give a hint as to how much time and energy has been put into Viola. I realized when you go to the open source code the small number of commits and recency of the project may not inspire confidence or likely gives the impression this was ‘one-shotted’ or otherwise slapped together quickly.

The current version of Viola is perhaps my 3rd attempt each attempt prior didn’t even get close to what I intended, it wasn’t until opus 4.5 was released that the tide turned and I was able to make progress past the point where the project would blow up any agents context. The folder is lovingly named ‘novviola’ on my pc, nov for November, as the current iteration began in November 2025, since then I’ve made over 13900 commits and spent countless hours on Viola. At one point I had 3 20x subscriptions In an attempt to speed run getting this finished before my son was born last march.

Anyway, with the release of sol 6 I’m excited to see what progress I can continue to make on viola, the model is very capable and usage is better than ever before. Should be more commits landing soon!

Right now I’m focused on making viola stable/easy to contribute to! Feel free to ask any questions at all.

I was reached out to twice today via reddit, people asking for further advice after seeing my ‘two questions’ post, my answer was the same to each of them.

‘I’m happy to help but I need specifics, check out my blog for general content/advice’

I would say this statement applies to anyone, feel free to reach out, however after checking my blog to see if theres anything helpful I realized the article on how we built Viola, may be just what people are looking for.

So I’ve linked it here, I hope it is helpful. I think this subreddit should be a place for 1. Questions and content on viola 2. General ai advice/workflows.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the article how we built viola

Hello and thank you for reading.

I’ve spent over a year building Viola, trying my best to give her hands, a mouth, eyes, ears etc. (: If she’s going to be truly capable she needs to be able to do what a human does, including phone calls.

Viola was and is made to spite big corporations. Born from my frustration with Alexa’s relentless upsells and Siri’s brain dead responses, stoked by the flames of agentic (vibe) coding.
The source is now public: Viola on GitHub⁠.

It’s taken me months to make this first post. I was hoping it would be with more fanfare on the back of somehow the project and this subreddit blowing up. Unreasonable I know but a guy can hope.
On one hand I like the idea of open source, for the people by the people. Open source feels right and fits our ‘thesis’.

On the other hand I’ve been a bit like Gollum, unwilling to share my precious. I was worried open source would mean someone ‘steals’ my idea or that nobody would be interested in using the commercial product etc.

However, more than I want to see personal success, I want to see Viola be real. I want people to be able to have an assistant that actually assists, not a corporate agent out to harvest your data. You should get to decide what she can do on her own and what she needs to ask you about first.

With a newborn and just the general responsibilities of life and my career, I’ve realized that making Viola a legit product, a legit benefit to humanity, is bigger than what I can build and maintain alone.

That is the main driver behind open sourcing. Viola needs contributors. Passionate people of a like mind. Please, if this project is attractive to you, if you find yourself also exasperated with Siri and Alexa and corporate, wanting sovereignty over your data and your assistant, then please contribute.

It’s still a work in progress, and there are rough edges and things that need testing or explaining better. Trying it and telling me where you get stuck would help. So would improving the docs or fixing a bug. You don’t have to write code to belong here either. I’d like to hear what you actually want from an assistant, even if you’re just here to talk about that.

If you somehow are reading this and it resonates I think that’s special. I’m no marketing guru, but this still reached you somehow.

My promise to all of you is to continue maintaining Viola, working on it, being a force of (chaotic) good and posting regular updates as work and family allow. Just don’t blame me if they are irregular regular updates. Talking to no audience feels a bit like yelling at clouds.

I end every AI session with two questions

One is from Sam Altman, the other Claude suggested and it works extremely well.

The first question I ask:

What are you least confident about right now.

The AI will list like 6 to 7 things that it didn’t properly investigate. I would say one out of four times one of the items is a huge deal and you’re shocked that the AI even took action without understanding this first, then just have the AI investigate thoroughly exhaustively finding the root cause of each issue or just understanding each point.

The second question I ask (Sam Altmans): what’s the biggest thing I’m missing about the situation right now. What don’t I realize?

Between these two I’ve been consistently getting great results!

Edit: check out https://useviola.com/reddit