Commentarii Roamani

Hello Roamans! The community has been building a lot lately and we have several new extensions to cover in the coming weeks. We are starting today with Chief of Staff by Mark Lavercombe.

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Roam Depot Gems: Chief of Staff

Chief of Staff is an AI assistant that lives inside your Roam graph. You talk to it through a chat panel in the corner of your screen, and it reads your notes, manages your tasks, and connects to outside tools like Gmail and Google Calendar. Keep reading to learn more about what it can do and how to set it up.

What it can do

You can ask Chief of Staff to:

• Read your graph, create blocks, and manage your tasks in natural language
• Connect to Gmail, Google Calendar, Todoist, and a large number of other apps
• Run scheduled jobs automatically (like a daily briefing every morning)
• Run custom workflows you write yourself and store in your graph (skills)
• Remember context across sessions

It also supports local tools on your machine like Zotero or GitHub through MCP servers (MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets AI assistants connect to external tools and data sources) and has a dry-run mode to preview any action before it executes.

Setup

First, install Chief of Staff via Roam Depot.

Second, fill in your AI provider details in the settings. Chief of Staff connects to an AI model through your own account with a provider like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), or Mistral. Go to your provider's website, generate an API key, and paste it into the extension settings.

That said, a good number of commands like adding something to today's page or listing your tasks never touch the AI provider at all.

Third, connect your external apps (optional but recommended). This part requires three free accounts: GitHub, Cloudflare, and Composio. Follow along this video to set it up:

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Once this is set up, Chief of Staff can reach your Gmail, Google Calendar, and other connected apps directly from Roam, you just need to add the tool.

Take a look at Mark Lavercombe's full description available in Roam Depot as well as his explanatory video here for more details!

Cost and privacy

In general, AI API costs are very cheap, often fractions of a cent per interaction, and you pay your AI provider directly based on how much you use it. Most interactions stay on the cheapest model tier, and a live cost tracker in the chat panel shows you what you are spending as you go. Keep in mind that a good number of commands never touch the AI at all, so not everything you do will cost anything.

On the privacy side, your full graph is never sent anywhere. The extension pulls only the relevant parts of your notes when you ask something which go directly to your chosen provider and nowhere else. Also, a PII scrubbing layer strips personal identifiers like emails and phone numbers from anything leaving your browser, and it is on by default.

Head to the Roam Depot to install Chief of Staff now, and a thank you to Mark Lavercombe for building this amazing tool!

​Join our Slack channel here, and don’t forget to check out the Roam help graph for updates!