I'm an enterprise account executive in Chicago, covering the Midwest. Nine years of selling technology to large organizations, mostly to people who have been sold to badly before and can tell immediately when it is happening again.
Somewhere in there I started building the tools I kept wishing existed. It got out of hand. There are now a couple hundred small programs running on a machine at home — they watch my calendar, index what I read, sort my inbox, run models I fine-tuned myself, and tell me when one of them has broken.
The rule I build by is that private things stay on my own hardware. A small local model reads anything sensitive and hands the cloud a summary instead of the document. The cloud still does the hard thinking. It just never sees the parts that are mine.
The other rule is that a language model may propose but never commit. The thing that actually writes to disk, moves money, or sends a message is always plain deterministic code with a switch I can flip. Agents draft. Code decides.
The drawings on this page are mine too. Same pen, same habit — start somewhere and let the pattern find its own edges.