DHDhruvMaradiya·Mar 4, 2026Submission
Gaia – open-source assistant that does for actions what ChatGPT did for answers
Three years ago, finding information meant opening Google, clicking 4 links, reading, and piecing together an answer yourself. ChatGPT collapsed that into one step.
We haven't had that moment for taking action yet.
To set a recurring water reminder today, you still open your todo app, hit New Task, type it out, set a recurrence, and save. To block focus time, you open Calendar, find a slot, create an event, then update your Slack status separately. Every small action is a small tax. They add up to hours of invisible overhead every week.
GAIA is our attempt at that shift. You tell it what you want done — or it acts before you have to ask.
Gmail & Calendar
"Summarise my unread emails and flag anything needing a reply" — runs every morning automatically.
"Block 2 hours Thursday for deep work" → calendar event created, Slack status updated.
"
Read the rest
Draft a follow-up to anyone I haven't heard back from in 5 days" → drafted, waiting for your review.
Slack & Notion
"Turn the action items from today's standup into Notion tasks with owners and deadlines".
"Remind the team on Slack every Friday at 4pm to update their Linear tickets".
GitHub
"Every time a PR is opened, post a summary to the #engineering Slack channel".
"Assign new issues labelled bug to me automatically".
Add your own integrations via MCP
GAIA has 20+ integrations out of the box. If yours isn't there, you can build your own using MCP, and publish it to the marketplace for others to use. Any existing MCP server works with GAIA out of the box.
The honest version: it works well for workflows you define explicitly, and it's getting better at the ones you don't.
We're a small student team. We've been using GAIA ourselves for quite some time — it genuinely changed how we work, which is why we're releasing it now instead of waiting for perfect.
The design question we keep coming back to: at what point does an assistant acting autonomously feel like it's no longer under your control? We've defaulted to "always reviewable before it sends" — curious how this community thinks about that line.
heygaia.io (no setup)
Self-host: docs.heygaia.io/self-hosting
GitHub: github.com/theexperiencecompany/gaia