AI & Local LLM
Running AI on your own hardware — local LLMs, agents, and image generation. No subscriptions, no cloud, no computer-science degree.
DisPatch: A Self-Hosted Chat App for Local AI Agents
A locally hosted LLM chat app, file server, and terminal — available on every device in the house at all times. The ~720KB app I built to replace a 30-container Rocket.Chat install.
The CHUWI AuBox Ai365: My AI Home Lab in a Box
An obscure Strix Point mini PC with dual 2.5GbE, USB4 and a Ryzen AI 9 365 — running Bluefin Linux, hosting eight AI agents, and drawing under 5 W at the chip. It replaced a dead 128 GB tablet, and this post gets updated as the box changes.
StudioForge: A GPU-Only LLM Server That Replaced LM Studio on My Rig, Run Remotely by My Agents
I wrote the model server I wanted: an OpenAI-compatible llama.cpp gateway on port 1234 that plans VRAM before it loads, refuses a model rather than spilling it to the CPU, pins the ones that must stay warm, and publishes 29 MCP tools so an agent on another machine runs the whole rig. Free download, source on GitHub.
SiftForge: A Local-LLM Email Assistant That Reads Your Mail, Writes the Reply, and Never Sends It
A self-hosted email triage assistant: an IMAP listener, a local model, and a drafts queue. It classifies, labels and writes the reply — then stops. Sending is a human click, always. Free, MIT, download below.
My OpenClaw Setup: One Box That Can Make Websites
One Linux mini PC runs OpenClaw agents that write, build, and publish my websites through a gated, backed-up deploy pipeline — every deploy dry-runs first, backs up the server, and waits for my go-ahead.
Eight AI Agents, One AMD Box: My Local Agent Stack (OpenClaw)
Eight named AI agents live on one mini PC in my house — a dispatcher, a hard thinker, a local workhorse, a vision bot — with DeepSeek's cheap API doing the heavy lifting for about $24 a month.
DeepSeek Harness (dsh): I Installed DeepSeek's Open-Source Coding Agent, Wired It Into My Chat App, and Benchmarked It
DeepSeek shipped an MIT-licensed coding agent on August 13. Five days later it runs on my Bluefin box as a systemd service, sits next to Reasonix in DisPatch, and passed 15/15 tasks on three models — including a local one. Setup, numbers, gotchas.
My AI Agent Built a Benchmarking Tool for My AI Agents
I asked Hermes, my coding agent, to build a CLI that benchmarks my local models. It came back with bench-llm — 1,660 lines of Python against LM Studio. A year of using it turned it into CrucibleForge: 251 cases, 158 of them hard, graded by execution.
What My AI Agents Actually Cost: DeepSeek vs the Big APIs
Two months of my always-on agent stack cost $30.57 on DeepSeek — $6.49 for July alone. But DeepSeek raises prices on August 16, and the same July workload jumps to ~$14–$27. Full old-vs-new breakdown, plus what GPT-5.6, Claude, Grok, and Kimi would charge.
Reasonix: A Claude-Code-Style Coding Agent on DeepSeek
A terminal coding agent that works like Claude Code — subagents, skills, project memory — but runs against DeepSeek's pay-per-token API instead of a subscription. Setup, model tiers, and a hands-off auto-updater.
The ASUS ROG Flow Z13: My Portable Home Lab That Refused to Stay Portable
A 128 GB gaming tablet ran my AI agents, my websites, and my whole home network — until a power fault started dropping it into sleep 30 seconds after every power-on. Here's the full post-mortem.
WordPress to Static With Claude Code: How I Rebuilt This Site in an Afternoon
This site used to run on WordPress. An AI coding agent rebuilt it as Markdown files plus a 183-line Python generator in an afternoon — and the same workflow still maintains it.
Putting a Chatbot on the Public Web — On My Own Hardware
A chatbot on a public website, but the brain is a small model running on a computer in my house — free per token and private. Here's the relay architecture that makes it safe, the security holes I had to close, and an honest accounting of how slow it is and what it would still need to be production-ready.
Set Up Your LLM Assistant: Claude Code, Cowork, Terminex, and DeepSeek
The hub guide every "implement this yourself" box on this site points at: what an agentic LLM assistant is, and four real ways to get one running today.
OpenClaw Broken? I Fix It with Claude Code
My two-tier repair strategy: OpenClaw agents handle the routine work, and when something truly breaks, Claude Code fixes the box — then teaches OpenClaw to handle it next time.
Local AI Image Generation on an AMD Mini PC: ComfyUI + Z-Image Turbo
How I turned an AMD mini PC into a local AI image generator — ComfyUI and Z-Image Turbo running as a systemd service, no cloud account, about 27 seconds per 1024px image.
How I Built OMLA by Directing AI Agents Instead of Writing the Code
One guy, no backend team: I directed AI coding agents to build a real royalty-licensing platform for a nonprofit, audits and gated deploy included. The actual process, not the highlight reel.
How to Have an LLM Adapt Any Project to Your System
The general recipe for taking any open project — a GitHub repo or a zip from this site — and having an AI assistant make it run on your machine, even if you don't code.
Headless ComfyUI: Run It as a Service, Use It from Anywhere
The follow-up to my AMD ComfyUI build: run it headless as a systemd service, drive it from scripts over the HTTP API, and use the browser UI securely from any device — while every workflow still saves to the box.
I Built My Family a Trip Itinerary App — with an AI Assistant Inside It
A private, PIN-gated itinerary web app for a family trip to Japan — day-by-day plans, live weather, offline support, and a built-in AI assistant that can answer questions and make small edits. Here's how it came together, gotchas and all, with a scrubbed sample you can download.
DeepSeek Everywhere: Wiring a Cheap Cloud Brain Into Claude Code and a Local Agent Stack
DeepSeek quietly backs both my home agent stack and Claude Code now. Here are the three copy-pasteable wiring patterns, including the systemd trick that keeps the API key out of argv entirely.
WordPress: Use AI to Make Custom Blocks (Free Accordion Example)
A free copy-paste accordion for WordPress — plain HTML and CSS, no plugin, no JavaScript — plus the exact AI prompt that wrote it.
DeepSeek: Running Locally — a 4-Step Guide (No Experience Needed)
A four-step guide to running DeepSeek on your own PC with Ollama, Docker, and Open WebUI. No cloud account, no subscription — just a graphics card with 8 GB of vRAM.
AI Chef
One copy-paste system prompt turns a chat AI into ProChef: weekly dinner plans, real recipes, and a grocery list already sorted by store section. Runs on my local Ollama box, but plain ChatGPT works too.