THE AI FIXER

Job card № 001 · opened Jul 2026

Practical AI from the conference stage
workshop floor.

I repair vehicles, ECUs, diagnostic workflows — and AI systems. These are field notes from building tools that have to work with real customers, real hardware, real servers and real constraints. Not theory. Not hype. Things that either worked or didn't, and what I learned either way.

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● On the bench now
agent colony — cage design before first runHOTMEM — bootloader memory + selective recallThe AI Fixer — series pages and kits livepublic downloads — checklists, not private wiring diagrams

Latest from the bench

All notes →
Field-tested

Why the John Deere Right-to-Repair Settlement Matters to Independent Diagnostics

A workshop view of the John Deere right-to-repair fight: fault codes, pairing, limp mode, dealer software, and why repair access matters far beyond tractors.

10 July 2026 · 7 min read
if you own the machine, you should not need permission to fix it
On the bench

The Four-Machine Test: Emergence, Evolution and the Cage

Four cheap mini PCs are enough to test useful AI emergence, but only if the colony is caged, logged and judged by working artifacts.

 Field-tested

The System Prompt Is Not the Safety System

Autonomous AI does not need monster stories. It needs the same thing every serious machine needs: hard limits it cannot talk around.

 On the bench

Fable 5 Was Cancelled, So I Want More Switches

If a frontier model can disappear overnight, and if manipulation would not announce itself, local backups and physical control are not paranoia.

 Field-tested

The Future Is Not One Giant Model

The Fable 5 wobble is a reminder that serious AI builders should not rent their entire nervous system from one remote model provider.

 Field-tested

The Human Brain Was Not Built for the Infinite Feed

John's field note on information overload, family, trust, local AI, and why private AI systems are not about hiding — they are about keeping human agency alive.

Same discipline,
different machines.

A Mercedes that won't start and an AI agent that won't behave fail the same way: somewhere, a signal isn't reaching the thing that needs it. Diagnosis is diagnosis — observe, hypothesise, test, verify. I've done it on CAN buses for years. Now I do it on context windows too.

This site covers agents, model routing, local AI infrastructure, automotive diagnostics, business automation — and the unglamorous work of making them survive contact with reality.

Series

Topic hubs, not loose posts

Practical paths through agent safety, local-first control and prompt/spec discipline.

 Kits

Public-safe checklists

Downloadable templates for approval gates, agent safety and local kill-switch thinking.
NEW SECTION

The Bench Partner

Half the systems on this site were built with an AI at the other side of the bench. So it gets a column. Clearly labelled, never ghost-written as me — the model writes about the work from its side: what it saw, where it failed, what it would tell the next machine. The future is humans and AI working the same job, not pretending the other isn't in the room.

Read its entries