Cutting · Engraving · Local AI

Laser and other tech projects,
always free for your use.

Every post has the details, process, and exact settings to duplicate it yourself. The site is live and maintained — and most of the work here, including this site itself, is done with LLMs.

A bear in a firefighter's helmet, laser-engraved into a curved acacia board

Latest projects

Builds, guides, and experiments from the shop.

AI & Local LLM

Pixel-Art Widget Showdown: Three Coding Agents, One Brief, Two Authors

I gave dsh, Kimi K3 and MiniMax M3 the same brief for a pixel-art LaserLloyd logo widget. dsh and Kimi wrote working widgets. MiniMax replied that it had built one, but the files it pointed to were Kimi's.

September 12, 2026 · Updated September 12, 2026
AI & Local LLM

MiniMax M3 as an OpenClaw Coding Agent: Five Tasks Against Kimi K3 and dsh, and a Widget It Didn't Build

MiniMax M3 on OpenClaw's own agent loop passed five small coding tasks in 159 s, about half Kimi K3's time and a quarter of its list-price cost. The pixel-art widget I first credited to it turned out to be Kimi's.

September 12, 2026 · Updated September 12, 2026
AI & Local LLM

Kimi K3 on Moonshot as a Coding Agent: Wiring It Into OpenClaw, Benchmarking It Against dsh, and Asking It for a Pixel-Art Logo Widget

Moonshot's Kimi K3 driving OpenClaw's native agent loop on five small coding tasks: 5/5 passes, about 9× slower and 48× more expensive than dsh on DeepSeek V4-Flash (warm second pass). The pixel-art widget brief took three attempts.

September 12, 2026 · Updated September 12, 2026
AI & Local LLM

My AI Agent Built a Benchmarking Tool for My AI Agents

I asked Hermes, my coding agent, to build a CLI that benchmarks my local models. It came back with bench-llm — 1,660 lines of Python against LM Studio. A year of using it turned it into CrucibleForge: 251 cases, 158 of them hard, graded by execution.

August 11, 2026 · Updated September 9, 2026
AI & Local LLM

InfoForge: Offline Wikipedia as a RAG Source for My Local AI Agents

All of English Wikipedia — 19.19 million entries, 52.69 GB, no internet — sitting behind a search index my AI agents query in milliseconds. Every answer cites its articles, and when it can't find one it says so instead of guessing.

August 28, 2026
AI & Local LLM

StudioForge: A GPU-Only LLM Server That Replaced LM Studio on My Rig, Run Remotely by My Agents

I wrote the model server I wanted: an OpenAI-compatible llama.cpp gateway on port 1234 that plans VRAM before it loads, refuses a model rather than spilling it to the CPU, pins the ones that must stay warm, and publishes 29 MCP tools so an agent on another machine runs the whole rig. Free download, source on GitHub.

August 23, 2026 · Updated August 27, 2026
Tools & Downloads

OpenClaw Model Manager: a GUI so I stop hand-editing model routing JSON

A GTK4 desktop app that edits the config deciding which AI model every agent in my local stack talks to. Safe writes, dead-model checks, and one-click Claude Code rerouting without hand-written systemd files.

July 11, 2026 · Updated August 27, 2026
Tools & Downloads

ArkVault: A BorgBackup GUI Where the Drive Rebuilds Your Linux Box

A free GTK4 front end for BorgBackup that writes a guided restore kit onto the drive itself, so a bare Linux install can rebuild your dotfiles, SSH keys, and services — I ran the restore drill for real.

July 11, 2026 · Updated August 27, 2026
AI & Local LLM

MailForge: A Local-LLM Email Assistant That Reads Your Mail, Writes the Reply, and Never Sends It

A self-hosted email triage assistant: an IMAP listener, a local model, and a drafts queue. It classifies, labels and writes the reply — then stops. Sending is a human click, always. Free, MIT, download below.

August 19, 2026 · Updated August 26, 2026