Build real AI on your own hardware

Not another course on calling a frontier API. mindpool teaches the full local lifecycle — run, ground, fine-tune, and ship open models you actually control.

// get the toolchain

$ curl -fsSL mindpool.io/install | sh

macOS · Linux · Windows (WSL2)

// or, on macOS (Apple Silicon)

$ brew install --cask mindpool-labs/tap/mpl

› browse curriculum

✓detected Apple M3 Max · 64GB unified — tier T3

✓installed ollama · llama.cpp · mlx-lm (pinned)

✓pulled Qwen3-8B · Q4_K_M · 4.7GB

✓fine-tune env ready — unsloth + trl

✓enrollment verified on-chain — 0x9f…2aE

▸module 09 · quantization — unlocked

$ cat ./what-you-actually-learn

The on-device lifecycle, end to end

Every module maps to a real step you run locally — no hand-waving, no "it just works."

01 → 02

Source & run

Read model cards on HF, run GGUF locally, expose a local API.

03 → 05

Prompt, ground & tools

Chat templates and sampling, RAG retrieval, then tool-use agent loops.

06 → 08

Data, tune & evaluate

Curate datasets, LoRA/QLoRA → GGUF with Unsloth, then score on an eval harness.

09 → 10

Optimize & ship

imatrix Q4_K_M quants, serve for throughput, package and hand off.

$ ls curriculum/ --depth=deep

Ten modules you couldn't have just googled

Primary-source-grounded, mechanism-level, misconception-busting. Self-paced — gated by enrollment.

M01rwx

01-foundations.md

Why local, the bandwidth truth, and the toolchain mpl installs.

M02rwx

02-run.md

Pull, run, and serve open models locally.

M03rwx

03-prompt.md

Chat templates, the sampler pipeline, and constrained decoding.

M04rwx

04-ground.md

Embeddings, vector search, and the retrieval-augmented generation pipeline.

M05rwx

05-tools.md

Tool-calling over the serving API, and building a local agent loop from primitives.

M06rwx

06-data.md

The chat/completion shapes mpl finetune consumes, train/val splits, and contamination.

› all 10 modules

$ df -h ./hardware

Pick the rig that runs the work

Bandwidth, not capacity, sets your tokens/sec. Cloud-spot is the relief valve for the rare 70B full tune.

› the buyer's guide — 4 tiers