For individuals — personal AI, home setups, single-user workflows
What it actually looks like to run a serious training pipeline at home in early 2026, the data prep, the orchestration, the evaluation, the operational discipline. Less hand-wavy than the typical write-up, more boring than the marketing pitch.
The category I've been writing about for two years arrived faster than the broader industry conversation acknowledges and slower than the early enthusiasts expected. The shape of what's actually here is more nuanced than either timing claim alone suggests.
The Copilot+ PC marketing pushed NPU silicon into mainstream Windows hardware in 2024-2025. The hardware shipped; the software story hasn't caught up to Apple's. Worth being honest about where each platform actually stands at the end of 2025.
DSPy lets you optimize prompts the way you'd optimize a model, programmatically, against an objective, with structured evaluation. The default DSPy workflow sends a lot of prompts to a hosted optimizer. The local-first version is doable, faster than expected, and worth the setup.
