Local-first AI tools, verification systems, and thoughtful software.
🏠 Org · 🌐 Website · 📝 Workshop ·
Spitfire Cowboy builds systems that take truth, boundaries, and human judgment seriously.
We care about:
- local-first tools instead of casual data exfiltration
- receipts over vibes instead of self-reported prestige
- bounded tools instead of vague autonomous sprawl
- human-scale coordination instead of machine-paced churn
talos— workload discipline and focus tooling
alcove— search your own documents locally, with no server and no sign-upalcove-congress— public GovInfo Congress loaders for Alcove indexesalcove-mirrulations— public Mirrulations loaders for Alcove indexesalcove-dux— open-source plagiarism detection
ship-receipts— artifact-backed provenance cards and receipt tooling
StackChan— open source StackChan workflash-moe— running larger models on smaller machinesml-intern— an open-source ML engineer experiment
- keep systems inspectable
- keep trust boundaries explicit
- prefer small, reversible changes
- avoid claims that cannot be independently checked
- Read the workshop: https://spitfirecowboy.com/workshop/
- Explore Alcove: https://github.com/Spitfire-Cowboy/alcove
Different repositories here have different maturity levels and collaboration patterns.
As a default:
- read the repo README first
- prefer focused issues and small diffs
- run tests before opening a PR
- respect each repo's branching and release conventions
Some of the thinking behind these systems is written in public at:
That is where we write about subsidiarity, receipts, local knowledge, and the practical realities of building trustworthy AI systems.