AI you can own, trust, and control.
Right now you're doing one of two things with AI: sending it data you'd rather not (your journal, your clients' files, your company's IP), or scrubbing and holding back what you share, and getting less from it because of that. The most useful AI is the one that can see all of it as reality is undivided. However, that kind of data that should never leave your hands.
I build private AI systems on hardware you own: your knowledge, personal and business, automatically ingested and maintained, queryable in plain language, with sources cited. No per-seat subscriptions that grow forever. No black box you can't inspect. I run this exact system on the most sensitive data I have: my own personal life and business. You can have it too, and I'm happy to tell you how even if we never work together. I value sovereignty, and I want it for more people than just me.
What I Do
AI Privacy Assessment
One week, fixed price. I map what AI you already use, where your data actually goes, which of your work could run privately, and what the hardware would cost you. You get a written report and a build-or-don't-build recommendation. If private AI is the wrong answer for you right now, the report says so and we're done. I only want to work with people this would actually benefit.
Private AI Setup
Hardware specification, local AI models deployed on machines you own, secure access from anywhere, and an evaluation suite proving the model handles your real work before you rely on it. Where a hybrid makes sense, I wire cloud fallback with explicit boundaries on what may ever leave your hardware. You keep everything when I leave: the machines, the models, and a plain-language runbook. No lock-in, not even to me.
Private Brain (coming soon)
Phased engagement, fixed price per phase. Your documents, notes, and accumulated knowledge (yours, or your company's), automatically ingested and maintained, queryable in plain language, on hardware you own. Karpathy sketched the idea of an LLM-maintained wiki. There's a long way between that sketch and a second brain you can actually trust: one that has epistemic integrity, admits what it doesn't know, and keeps itself honest while you're busy living your life. An AI that makes up answers or gives stale answers confidently about your own life or business is worse than useless, and one that demands more maintenance than it saves is missing the point. Closing that gap is the engineering I run on my own system every day. This service brings it to yours.
Every engagement is quoted as a fixed price up front, before any work begins. After any build, an optional monthly care plan covers model updates, re-evaluation as your work changes, new workflow wiring, and priority support. And every system ships with a handover runbook, so you are never dependent on me to keep running.
Results
My Own Private AI Infrastructure
In 2026 I moved my own AI workloads off cloud APIs and onto hardware I own. Web search, chat, and coding agents all run on local models on my machines, and my family uses them too. I sell what I operate.
Built an evaluation harness before trusting any of it. A local model doesn't take over a job here until it proves, on my real work, that it can do that job. I switched when my eval set or direct experience said so, not before.
- Deployed local AI models on my own Apple silicon server, reachable only over an encrypted private network, with full-disk encryption at rest.
- Built an evaluation harness before trusting it. I would use local models if and when it meets frontier cloud model performance or can sufficiently do the job I need it for. I only switched over when the eval set proved it.
- Engineered private-first routing with graceful fallback, and explicit boundaries on what may ever fall back to the cloud, so my work degrades gracefully instead of breaking.
- Hardened it against the failure modes that kill real deployments: power loss, reboots, auto-start, and runtime updates. I found these by hitting them, then fixing them.
- Only explicitly permissioned devices can talk to the inference server or access certain AI apps within a private network mesh to reduce vulnerability gaps.
Mir'at
Mir'at is my user-owned, local-first personal AI: a knowledge system that holds my whole life (work, health, family, finances) and maintains itself with integrity. Its differentiators: an epistemic integrity layer (inline citations, claim verification, contradiction detection), and tolerance for my inattention. It keeps itself honest, heals itself, and improves itself through the weeks I'm too busy to touch it. The Private Brain service applies this same engineering to your knowledge, personal or business.
Why Me
I'll tell you when AI is the wrong answer.
Not everyone needs a private AI system, and not every problem needs AI at all. My assessments recommend the least powerful tool that genuinely serves you, including "none," and when cloud AI under a proper agreement is honestly your best fit, I'll say that too. The evaluation comes before the build, and the recommendation is not tied to what I'd like to sell you. AI should serve you. AI should serve us and humanity not the other way around.
If AI is part of how you think, it should belong to you.
I'm neurodivergent. AI tools are part of my working memory, my planning, and my communication, which means they hold things I would never hand to a vendor. I build for people who use AI the same way: not as a toy, but as infrastructure for your mind. That infrastructure should be yours.
I'm a developer with over a decade in production.
Private AI is not just a model on a box. It's epistemiology, reliability, security, privacy, disaster recovery, interfaces, performance, accessibility, and UX you'll actually want to live in. I've shipped production software for over ten years across startups (including my own), Fortune 500s, and a non-profit, and I bring all of that to these builds, not just the AI parts.
Everything I ship is accessible.
I'm also an accessibility engineer currently working with a digital accessibility non-profit and on the W3C COGA Open Community group so every interface I deliver is built with WCAG standards as the floor and true accessibility as the goal from from day one: usable by you, your team, and your customers, including people with disabilities. See my digital accessibility engineering services.
Interested?
If you hold data that can't leak (yours, your family's, your clients', your company's, your business's) and you want AI that respects that and still be useful, I can help. Book a free 30-minute consultation. I'll listen first. If private AI isn't the right fit, I'll tell you that for free.
Email me