This tutorial was written by Néstor Daza.
I use Claude every day. It's a great tool for my day-to-day work, helping with everything from research and text processing to, above all, writing code (nothing surprising here). But today, that little coder voice in my head asked me: what would it take to build my own version, running on infrastructure I understand and control? What if I could have my own AI bot? So that is what I am doing, and this is the first entry in a series documenting it.
The app is called Claudius. It is a personal, Claude-style chat workspace I am building for myself, with MongoDB as its entire backbone and Claude models served through AWS Bedrock. Every article in the series will ship with public code. The app runs on MongoDB Atlas’s free tier, so nothing here is a pattern you read about and cannot reach. You can clone it, run it, and lift the parts you want into your own work.
Why build it when Claude already exists?
Yes, yes, Claude already exists, and it is very good, so why build a smaller, less-featured version of it? Because the best teacher is you, building with your own hands! Building the agent loop by writing the code, with state and retrieval, I actually have to figure out how to make it work, and the entire infrastructure needed to run it will not only show me a lot of what a finished product hides, but should also be a really fun project!
