Start here: what to build first, and why
You do not need permission, a subscription, or a room full of servers. You need one spare computer and a sensible order to do things in. This page is the order.
Work down the list and by the bottom you will own the whole setup instead of renting it. Each step is a full guide with the reasons, the mistakes, and the exact instructions. None of it costs more than a hard drive you probably already have and an evening of your time.
Do them in order. Each step quietly teaches a habit the next one leans on, so skipping ahead tends to cost more time than it saves. If you already know your way around, jump in anywhere you like.
You will not break anything you cannot undo. Every guide says what to check before you change something, and how to put it back.
A word about the two halves of each guide
Every guide is written in two parts, and you are welcome to read only the first.
What happened and why it matters is the story. No instructions, no commands, nothing to type. It explains what the thing is, why anyone would want it, and what went wrong when we built it. If you never intend to build any of this yourself, this half is still worth your time, because it is really about how to think when a machine tells you something that is not true.
How to do it yourself is the practical half. Every command is explained in plain words before it appears: what it does, why you are running it, and what should happen when it works. If you would rather skip it, skip it knowing exactly what you are skipping.
The order
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Step 1Own your AI assistant
A private assistant running on a computer in your house. Your questions do not leave the building, there is no monthly bill, and it keeps working when the internet does not.
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Step 2Remove the ads everywhere at once
One small computer cleans up the internet for every device in the house, television and phones included, with nothing to install on any of them.
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Step 3Keep the films you paid for
Your own film and television library, on your own machine, so nothing disappears the day a licensing deal ends.
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Step 4A smart home that answers to you
Lights and voice control that keep working during an internet outage, and that do not require an account with anybody.
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Step 5Put your own website in your own house
A real public website served from a spare room for around ten dollars a year, without exposing your home network to strangers.
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Step 6Build an assistant that can actually do things
What people really mean by an AI agent, and why the short list of jobs you allow it to do matters far more than which model you pick.
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Step 7Backups that will actually be there
Three copies, one of them somewhere else entirely, and the single test that turns a backup from a hope into a fact.
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Step 8Reach your machines from anywhere, safely
A private network joining your own computers over the internet, with nothing left open for strangers to find.
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Step 9The things we got wrong
The rules that came out of real mistakes, written down so that a few of yours are free.
After the nine steps
The rest of the guides are less of a ladder and more of a set of hard won lessons. Several of them belong to one story that runs across five separate guides, about machines that report everything is fine while quietly doing nothing at all. If you only read one thing on this site after the list above, read that one.
Start the series: My assistant told me it had done the job. It had not.
Or see every guide in the order it was written.
This page in the original Kyber Cypher voice: START HERE