New to AI and want to actually build instead of just subscribe? The complete beginner path, run your first model tonight, then add a voice, a face, vision, video, and an agent, one free step at a time.
Turn a local model into an agent that actually does things, the harness pattern (loop, tools, memory, schedule), your first scheduled job, and the gates that make unattended AI shippable.
Your local model can probably already see, how to check in 60 seconds, three working vision patterns (screenshot describe, eyes for a text-only brain, live companion vision), and the three gotchas that cost us real debugging hours.
One local model, six daily superpowers, chat with your documents, digest long videos, summarize voice memos, build study guides, prep interviews, draft anything, all offline and private.
The brain is the biggest VRAM line-item and the biggest latency trap. How we run a 26B multimodal LLM via Ollama with sub-second warm responses, persistent memory, and free screen vision.