Private local AI · Built by hand · Honestly measured
A hearth is masonry — the built structure at the center of a home where fire is contained and put to work. Hearth is that, for AI: open local models are the fire, and around them we've built the structure — a proving ground, an honest record, and real tools — entirely on our own hardware. No cloud, no bill, nothing leaves the building.
A small fleet of open models living on the shop machine — qwen writes the code, with codestral, deepseek, and a vision model alongside. Raw capability, kept in-house.
Read how it was tamed → The ForgeEvery night the fire is put to work on a graded battery of real coding jobs, auto-scored against the right answers — live from the shop, wins and misses alike.
Watch it live → The MantelWhat sits above the fire: every model that has run the batteries, compared head-to-head — best and average, honestly measured, nothing polished.
See the record →What turns a tested model into real work — writing and running code, editing across files, reading screenshots, searching the web — routed to whichever model has earned the job.
Working in the shop today.