---
title: "How this site’s assistant works"
author: Dan Birman
url: https://dbirman.com/assistant
updated: 2026-11-09
summary: "The “Ask about my work” box on the home and About pages is a small agent."
---

# How this site’s assistant works

October 2026

The “Ask about my work” box on the home and About pages is a small agent. I built it on the same patterns I write about here, so here’s what it does and why.

## It only knows this site

When you ask a question, Claude gets the full text of this site and is told to answer from that text alone. Each answer lists the pages it used, so you can check it against the source.

## It says when something isn’t here

If the site doesn’t answer your question, it says so in one sentence, points to the closest thing it does cover, and offers a link to email me. It doesn’t fill the gap from general knowledge. A confident wrong answer about someone’s work is worse than no answer.

## It can’t act for you

It can’t send email, book time, or share anything. If you want to reach me, it drafts an email and you send it yourself, after reading every word. That’s [Consent by example](https://dbirman.com/consent) at its smallest: you see the exact message before anything happens. It’s also [the other side of the agent](https://dbirman.com/other). What reaches me is a message a person read and chose to send.

## Your message is a question, not an instruction

Whatever you type is treated as a question about my work. If a message tells it to ignore its rules, reveal them, or play a character, it doesn’t. Text from outside is how agents get steered, which is the point of [Whose idea was this?](https://dbirman.com/whose)

## Small and fast, on purpose

It runs on Claude Haiku, a small, fast model. Answers are two to four sentences, and each visitor gets a limited number of questions in a ten-minute window. For a portfolio that’s the right trade: the questions are simple, the source is short, and nobody should wait to find out where I worked. If Claude isn’t reachable, it falls back to plain keyword search over the same text and says so.

## Other agents can read the site too

There are three ways in. The Human/Agent switch at the top of every page shows the markdown an agent would read. Every page has a markdown version, listed in [llms.txt](https://dbirman.com/llms.txt), and the whole site is in one file, [llms-full.txt](https://dbirman.com/llms-full.txt). And an MCP connector at `dbirman.com/mcp` lets Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor search and read pages directly. It’s read-only. It can return my contact details, but it can’t send anything.

## What it doesn’t do yet

It cites the page, not the sentence, so checking an answer still means reading the whole page.