Updated July 2026 for PAI 5: PAI Companion just got the same treatment as my new PAI 5 setup guide. The repo now ships the build that’s been running on several real installs for months, including a much bigger portal with a System hub of twenty browsable pages, and every instruction is tested against pinned PAI v5.0.0. If you haven’t installed PAI yet, start with the setup guide, then come back here. ...
Prefer video? Watch this on YouTube You followed the setup guide, you’ve got your AI assistant running in a VM, and now you’re wondering: how do I actually get files in there? ...
Update (July 2026): There’s a newer version of this guide written for PAI 5: Setting Up Your Personal AI Assistant (PAI 5). If you’re setting up fresh, start there. This page stays up for the PAI 3/4 era. Prefer video? Watch this on YouTube You’ve probably used Claude or ChatGPT in a browser or app. You type a message, it responds, you ask it for something, it generates documents and content for you. But then you have to download it, copy and paste it, put it where it needs to go. That’s useful, but it’s limited by how quickly you can move data back and forth between what it’s building, the notes you’re feeding it, and the places you’re testing and checking its work. ...
Here’s what keeps coming up for me about AI: we’re calling a lot of different things by the same name. There are the tools themselves. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot. Image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion. Voice cloning, video synthesis, coding assistants. A dozen categories of software, all lumped under one umbrella term. But there’s another layer that I think matters just as much: the perspectives people bring when they talk about AI. How you feel about these tools depends a lot on where you’re standing. Whether you see opportunity or threat, convenience or risk, the future of work or the end of it. We’re not just using different tools; we’re coming at this from completely different places. And I think that’s shaping adoption, trust, and the conversations we’re having about what AI should and shouldn’t do. ...
I’ve been meaning to do this for about a decade. Not this exact site, but something like it. A place to share what I’m working on, what I’m thinking about, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ve started and stopped a few times over the years, but it never stuck. Life got busy, projects piled up, and the idea of maintaining a blog always fell to the bottom of the list. ...