Real experiments. Plain English. No hype.
Beginner Model publishes cookbooks for building your own systems with AI. The first is The AI Memory Cookbook: a personal memory assistant that runs on your own files — your journal, your receipts, your whole record — and answers from them. We provide the bones; you flesh it out.
A cookbook, here, is a complete design you build yourself. This one takes you from an empty Google Drive to a working memory assistant: a system that keeps a journal of your days, files your receipts and documents, watches the mail you tell it to watch, and answers questions from the record it keeps. The record lives in your files, in your storage. The assistant is the librarian, not the owner.
It runs on three things: Muse, an Android phone, and Google Drive. That is the system minimum, stated plainly at the start of the first book.
1 · The User Guide
The system in daily use — what is set up, and what it can do.
2 · Privacy and Security
Where the risks sit, and which controls are yours — stated as facts, without promises.
3 · The Quick Start
The install alone: one agreement, the whole package, the permission pass.
4 · The Reference Manual
The complete specification: every module and procedure, in full.
5 · The Point Logger Book
How the GPS logger the system reads was specified, built, tested, and taken toward Google Play.
The set
Five books, one system, sold as one set. What's possible shows what the finished system does; Start yours is where the install begins.
In final preparation · Sold direct from this site when it opens
An essay, published under DEK Imagination — the first small book from this bench, and the cookbook's shelf-mate.
Cookbook help & updates
Corrections to the current edition, posted as they become available, and help by topic for owners. The updates page
Open
Some designs here graduate into small applications you can use yourself. The first is designed, and its build follows the cookbook launch:
Application 001 — Google Timeline Journal
Upload your own Timeline export and get calendar-journal entries out, using the exact rules from the model above. It runs in your browser: your location file never leaves your computer.
Designed · Build follows the cookbook launch
The discussion will live in the Beginner Model Community — a forum for the cookbook's readers, building their own systems and comparing notes: ask questions, show what you've built, and suggest what the next cookbook should be. It opens with the launch.
Beginner Model is one person's workshop for practical AI: a working technical person designing systems a normal person can build and own — the memory assistant is the first — and publishing the designs as cookbooks. It leans toward Muse, because personal-assistant work is what I wanted from AI on the very first day I used it, and because it has done specific jobs the others couldn't.
Beginner Model is not affiliated with Meta, OpenAI, Google, or any AI company. There's no team and no hype department — just a PO box, below, on purpose.
One short email when the cookbook goes on sale, and when something genuinely new posts. No schedule, no spam, unsubscribe any time.