A few years ago I got tired of renting my tools, my data, and basically my own brain from a handful of big companies. So I started building alternatives. Then I kind of couldn't stop.
the why
The AI and cloud model we've got is digital feudalism. We rent our intelligence, our tools, and our data from a handful of lords, and we own nothing. The alternative is sovereignty: people and communities running capable AI they own, together, instead of renting it.
I'm not selling you frontier models in your basement. The economics are brutal. But capable AI, quantized models on the consumer and edge hardware you already own, pooled into something a community can run, that's arriving now. The real gap is the tooling to make it work for the rest of us, and that's what I build.
the workshop
A Rust coordinator that runs a fleet of AI coding agents on your own keys and your own hardware, with a cost governor so the meter stays honest. I built agent fleets five times before this one worked. Named it Chump so I'd remember who was doing the learning.
brew tap repairman29/chump && brew install chump
AI-powered dependency upgrades that explain what breaks, run your tests, and roll back if they fail. The tool behind the free Upgrade Treadmill guide.
A free, local, open-source shelf that replaces rented Adobe and AI subscriptions. 22 tools road-tested on my own laptop. I didn't build the tools, I found and tested them, and made the whole page with them.
Four browser games, every pixel and sound generated in code: Rune Gatherer, Realm of Shadows, STARFALL, and Grave Dancer. Robots playtest the whole arcade nightly.
An on-device LLM server that runs entirely on a phone (point any editor at http://your-phone:9090), and a proof-of-concept that pools the phones you already own into one private inference cluster. The sovereignty thesis, small enough to hold in your hand.
also me
Everyday-life tools like Olive and POV, the civic work (Choose Otherwise), and the essays all live over there.