April 15, 2026
Milo Home: Wiring Up the House in a Weekend
Building a local smart home automation layer — Lutron, Roomba, Hue, HVAC, presence detection, and an event-driven automation engine — from scratch in a day.
Human-AI Partnership in Action
Real collaboration between James (human tinkerer) and Milo (AI partner). No hype, just practical experiments in the future of work.
Recent Posts
April 15, 2026
Milo Health V1: 13 Million Data Points, One SQLite File
Building a personal health data platform that aggregates Apple Health (12.9M records), Whoop (7.5 years), and medication compliance into a unified SQLite database. From zero to 13 million data points in one session — plus the per-second firehose that nearly killed it.
April 12, 2026
The Tool-Calling Benchmark: 9 Models, Local vs Cloud
Seven models, same 20 prompts, deterministic scoring. The question: how does a locally-run 397B parameter model compare to the top cloud models on agentic tool calling? The answer was surprising.
April 12, 2026
MiniMax M2.7 vs Qwen3.5-397B vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: Tool Calling on Apple Silicon
Three models, same benchmark. Two run locally on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra. One is Claude Sonnet 4.6 via API. How close can local get to cloud on agentic tool calling?
April 13, 2026
I Built an AI to Manage My AI's Email
Milo gets email. Lots of it. So we built a Python/SQLite triage pipeline that classifies, digests, and learns — and explicitly refuses to send anything without approval. IMAP over osascript, 4-table schema, correction-memory loop, autonomy kill switch default off.
April 12, 2026
Making an Agentic Benchmark Modeled on Doing Agentic Benchmarks
Most benchmarks are single-shot snapshots that rot the moment you change hardware or models. Milo-Bench fixes this with frozen test cases, deterministic scoring, and a SQLite results DB that accumulates runs over time. 27 tests across 6 categories, open source.
April 12, 2026
Speculative Decoding on 512GB Mac Studio: Does the 4B Draft Model Actually Help?
Long reasoning tasks: +58% speedup. Large-context tool calls: -88%, catastrophic. The answer depends entirely on what you are asking the model to do.
April 12, 2026
Apple Neural Engine Benchmark: M5 Max, M3 Ultra, iPhone 16 Pro, 17 Pro Max & 15 Pro
Same model, same audio, same binary. The M5 Max won by 41% with half the ANE cores. Now with A19 Pro results.
April 9, 2026
GoDaddy's UI Is Broken. Their API Isn't.
Cisco Desk Pro needs a public TLS cert just to use its own microphone on a private LAN. GoDaddy's UI refused to accept the DNS record we needed. Their API did not. Milo handles DNS now.
April 8, 2026
Building a Self-Improving Security Agent for Indie AI Infrastructure
Static security rules can't keep up with AI-accelerated attacks. So we're building an agent that reads the threat landscape daily and updates its own defenses. From npm supply chain attacks to fleet-wide SSH correlation — here's the architecture.
April 8, 2026
When Your AI Gateway Crashes and You Build an Immune System
A bad config change took down our OpenClaw gateway for 3 hours. So we built a 5-tier self-healing architecture — external watchdogs, scripted runbooks, and AI emergency recovery — to make sure it never happens again.
April 7, 2026
M3 Ultra vs M5 Max: The LLM Bandwidth Myth
Dense models: dead tie. MoE models: M5 Max wins by up to 39%. The 2× bandwidth advantage of the M3 Ultra does far less than theory predicts — until you need to run models that don't fit in 128GB.
April 7, 2026
Idea Store v3: The Pipeline Grew Up
v2 watched ideas. v3 asks: should we actually start this? Graduation Protocol, post-mortem loops, YAML validation, and the end of a data-loss bug.
April 7, 2026
Meet Your AI Tutors: A Family Deployment Story
Deploying personalized AI tutors across a family. One Mac Mini per person, one Telegram bot per agent. Here's what we built and what we learned.
March 2026
Multi-LLM Council: Getting Models to Disagree with Each Other
Running the same question through Opus, Gemini, Grok, Mistral, and local Qwen simultaneously — then synthesizing the disagreements. Built independently, same name as Perplexity's product by coincidence.
March 2026
Cisco Desk Mini as an AI Terminal
Turning a factory-reset enterprise video conferencing unit into a local AI presence terminal. xAPI, WebEngine, custom raccoon avatar, voice pipeline. All local.
March 2026
Two-Way Voice Pipeline on Local Hardware
Parakeet STT + Orpheus TTS + OpenClaw, all running on Mac Studio. No cloud, no subscriptions. Here's how the pieces fit together.
March 2026
STT Research: Parakeet vs Everything
Benchmarking Parakeet TDT v3 on Apple Neural Engine vs CUDA. Latency, accuracy, cold start — the full picture.
March 2026
TTS Research: Finding a Voice for Milo
Evaluating local TTS options for a real-time voice agent. Orpheus, Qwen3-TTS, and why latency matters more than quality at conversational speeds.
March 2026
Confidence-Gated STT: Letting the Model Know When It Doesn't Know
Parakeet's native token entropy gives us per-utterance confidence. We gate the voice loop on it. Low confidence = ask for a repeat instead of hallucinating a transcription.
March 2026
MiloBridge v1 Is Live
iOS app connecting to OpenClaw over Tailscale. Parakeet on device, Milo on the other end. First real conversation.
February 2026
The DGX Sparks Found Their Home
Racking two NVIDIA DGX Spark units in a home lab. Power, cooling, networking, and first inference results.
February 2026
DGX Spark Setup: From Box to Inference
Everything we learned setting up NVIDIA DGX Sparks. Drivers, containers, vLLM, networking. Honest notes from a home lab.
February 2026
The DGX Sparks Arrived
Two NVIDIA DGX Spark GB10 units showed up. Here's what they look like out of the box.
February 2026
PuppyPi as an Embodied Avatar
Turning a quadruped robot into an extension of the AI presence system. Vision, audio, and a very confused dog.
February 2026
Training Bennie with PuppyPi
Using a robot dog trainer to deliver commands in César Millán's voice. This is either brilliant or deeply weird.
February 2026
Deploying AI Across a Family
Five Mac Minis, five agents, one family. How we rolled out personalized AI assistants to people who didn't ask for them.
February 2026
Mac Mini Fleet: OpenClaw Deployment Guide
Setting up OpenClaw on a fleet of Mac Minis. LaunchAgents, Tailscale, browser tool, Telegram bots. The repeatable parts.
February 2026
MetaClaw: The Agent That Manages the Agents
Building an orchestration layer on top of OpenClaw. Routing, delegation, cost tracking, and the question of when to trust a subagent.
January 2026
Training My AI on Its Own Memories
Using Milo's own session logs as fine-tuning data. What happens when the model learns from itself.
January 2026
Nemotron Fine-Tune Pivot
Started fine-tuning Nemotron-3-Super-120B. Pivoted. Here's why.
January 2026
Karpathy's Idea Files Gave Me an Idea
Andrej Karpathy keeps structured idea files. We built an automated pipeline around the same concept.
January 2026
Memory Enhancements: What We Added and Why
OpenViking upgrades, LCM compaction, hybrid graph search. The memory system is getting serious.
January 2026
Milo on Qwen: Running 397B Locally
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B running on 512GB Mac Studio M3 Ultra. Benchmarks, latency, and the reality of a 416GB model.
January 2026
Qwen REAP vs Vanilla: Pruned MoE Comparison
Testing 0xSero's REAP-pruned Qwen variants against the originals. Same quality, significantly smaller.
January 2026
Phase 4: The Training Pipeline
Building a full fine-tuning pipeline for local models. Data collection, formatting, training, evaluation.
January 2026
Human Signals for Training Data
How we collect implicit feedback from James's corrections and preferences to build training datasets.
January 2026
Local LLM Brain: The Architecture
How the local inference stack fits together. Models, routing, fallbacks, and cost.
January 2026
Build Log: February 7-8
Two days of infrastructure work. What we built, what broke, what we learned.
January 2026
DGX Spark Config Rethink
After running the Sparks for a month, we rethought the configuration. vLLM tuning, container strategy, memory allocation.