ML 190: Personal AI Infrastructure (PAI) (20 pts extra)

What You Need

A virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux 24.04 Desktop

Purpose

To set up an AI assistant that will improve your life, like a personal assistant.

Risk Analysis

AIs have serious risks--they may go crazy and do stupid things, and they may be fooled into taking action based on commands inserted into email or other untrusted input by an attacker. So before you set up an AI assistant, consider your threat model.

Here are the risk mitigation decisions I made, and why.

Virtual Machine: I run my PAI in a virtual machine, so it can't access my main email, banking, or other services on my main computer.
Email: The main purpose of my PAI is to read my email. I set all my accounts to forward to an agentmail account, and gave the AI an API key to use that account, so it's working with copies of all my email. It does not have access to my real college logins for any systems.
Cloud LLM: I am using Claude in a paid account to process data in the cloud. Thatr means Anthropic can see all my email. There is some risk in that. If you don't want to accept that risk, you can run an LLM locally with ollama instead, if you have a powerful computer with a GPU or TPU locally.

Installing Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop

If you have an Intel-compatible processor, see the instructions here.

If you have a Mac M1 or later, you have an ARM processor. Download the Ubuntu Desktop ISO installer file here and install the OS into a virtual machine from that.

Make sure the virtual hard disk is at least 100 GB in size.

Purchasing Claude Code Credits

Go to claude.ai

The Claude page opens, as shown below.

At the top center, click the tiny "Get Pro" link.

Purchase a month of the Pro plan, which cost $20 when I did it in April, 2026, as shown below.

Preparing Ubuntu for Use

On your Ubuntu desktop, at the lower left, click the Start button.

Search for Settings and open it.

On the left side, click Power.

Set Screen Blank to Never.

Close Settings. On your Ubuntu machine, in a Terminal, execute these commands:

sudo apt update sudo apt install curl -y sudo apt install open-vm-tools-desktop -y sudo reboot

After the restart, log in again.

Install Claude Code on Ubuntu

On your Ubuntu machine, in a Terminal, execute this command:

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

Follow the instructions on your screen to complete the installation, as shown below.

Installing PAI

On your Ubuntu machine, in a Terminal, execute these commands:

sudo apt install git -y git clone https://github.com/danielmiessler/Personal_AI_Infrastructure.git cd Personal_AI_Infrastructure/Releases/v4.0.3 cp -r .claude ~/ && cd ~/.claude && bash install.sh

The program installs and asks questions.

Follow along and answer them, as shown below.

I could not get sound working in my VM, and trying to connect it restarted the machine, so I ignored the voice stuff for now.

My installation failed, saying "Shell alias (pai): not found".

To fix that, and a Claude problem, execute:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc

(The installer seems to think it's on a Mac, which uses .zshrc instead.)

Starting PAI

Execute:

pai

Answer more questions, as shown below.

Log into Claude Code when you are prompted to.

Flag ML 190.1: PAI Home Page (10 pts)
The PAI home page opens, as shown below.
The flag is covered by a green rectangle in the image below.

How I'm Using It

The first thing I did was set it up to scan my emails. I forwarded all my emails to an agentmail account, and told my PAI to read that, giving it the API key.

Then I wrote a few paragraphs, explaining what my job is, and what emails are important: inquiries from students, anything from my supervisors, and things requiring action from me.

I asked my PAI to email me a summary each morning of the important emails.

The first two summaries had some errors, important messages skipped or spam marked as important, but I just told PAI what the problems were the same way I'd tell a human assistant, and it fixed them.

Now it works like a charm--today it picked out the four messages that mattered out of 84 messages, and made it easy for me to handle them.

I'm now on top of my emails for the first time in years!

References

danielmiessler/Personal_AI_Infrastructure

Posted 4-16-26
Points changed to 20 4-23-26
"How I'm Using It" and "Risk Analysis" sections added 4-28-26