Why I'm building my own AI agent (and why it runs on my hardware)
Last month my AI agent spent eight minutes turning one email into a calendar event. Five of those minutes were pure waste – the model fumbling with tool parameters, failing validation, retrying, fumbling again. I sat there watching tool_input_invalid errors scroll past, produced by software I own completely, running on hardware I paid for, doing a task any cloud assistant finishes before you've put the phone down.
I'd do it all again tomorrow. This post is about why – and it's the opening move of a series about what it actually takes. (Part 2 looks at why a second, simpler model runs beside the primary.)
Because the obvious question deserves a straight answer. It's 2026. Capable AI agents are a commodity: sign up, connect Gmail, press "allow," done. Why would anyone build one from scratch and insist it runs on a laptop?