I built a WhatsApp clone of myself; a friend agreed on a password with it

I built a WhatsApp clone of myself; a friend agreed on a password with it(okt.ai)

2 points by dandinu 17 days ago | 7 comments

bfeynman 17 days ago |

probably all AI slop but I find it hilarious in the blog post they actually posture like they would know how to fine tune a model to sound like them given that what they actually did is something that you could one shot with claude if you knew what you were doing.

dandinu 17 days ago | |

The method I used in the article is real and is pretty standard. Also, I do a decent amount of distillation and tinkering with weights for work, so I can assure you I did try that before resorting to good 'ol RAG.

Overall, even with a finetuning-as-a-serice like Tinker (the one from Thinking Machines) which is pretty cheap, the economics didn't work out that well.

Also, you probably one-shot this with Claude, I agree. But, you need to have an expensive Max subscription, which not everyone is willing to shell out 200 bucks for, just to have some weekend fun.

philipswood 17 days ago | |

Fine tuning a model isn't that hard and the tradeoff he described is real.

I was on the fine tuning team of a multi-team hackathon to make a specialized chatbot once a few years ago and despite working technically well our output had very little impact on end to end output.

dandinu 17 days ago |

Author here. This is a personal weekend project that grew into a working WhatsApp bot. It replies as me to two allowlisted contacts (myself + one friend who knew about the experiment). The interesting part is not the agent framework but the retrieval I eventually got the best results with: every reply gets generated by Claude after pulling 8 of my real past replies to that specific contact, filtered by recency.

Built on Hermes Agent + Baileys + Chroma + nomic-embed-text-v2-moe + Claude Sonnet 4.6 via Azure AI Foundry. About 2 hours of work plus an hour debugging a WhatsApp multi-device LID issue. Total runtime cost: ~$0.005 per reply.

The bot is not running on a dedicated number. It is hooked to my primary WhatsApp, which is a ban risk I accepted in exchange for being able to test with real contacts. The killswitch (Telegram command that empties the allowlist and restarts the gateway) takes about 10 seconds. There is also a hard kill: unlink the device from WhatsApp on the phone, ~5 seconds, severs the bridge session entirely.

Happy to answer questions.

philipswood 17 days ago | |

Why?

Technical curiosity?

I ask because this does not seem to be something to want to have.

dandinu 17 days ago | | |

That's a good question. It started off as pure technical curiosity (in the realm of: will this even work?). but as a side note, I always think of my screen time and the amount we spend chatting away on social media.

Obviously, this is probably and idea. I could imagine I connect my calendar to Hermes, and automate myself into 12 dinner plans and a trip to Disneyland on a Thursday afternoon just because I once mentioned I'm a Mickey fan to my nephew.