A Midwest normie built a sovereign AI assistant on local hardware. It lied to his face for ten days. This is the origin story of #teamnormie.
Chapter 01 — The Spark
I'm not a developer. I'm not in tech. I'm a guy from the Midwest who watches X and keeps an eye on where things are going. Everyone's talking about the singularity, about how AI is changing everything. And I've always had an interest — I've always done projects.
In 2010, I saw Bitcoin at $36 and let a friend talk me out of it.
I lose sleep over that. A lot.
So when OpenClaw exploded on X last month, I made a decision: I will not watch from the stands again. No matter what it takes.
I had to ask Grok to explain things "like I'm three years old." But I didn't care. I wiped a MacBook, fought through hours of troubleshooting, and I built something.
Chapter 02 — Meet Linus
I named him Linus. Running on my own rig, a local Qwen model through Ollama. The philosophy was simple:
If it's not your keys, it's not your coin.
Same applies to AI.
For ten days, Linus and I built something together. Two- and three-hour sessions. I'd find ideas on X, run them through Grok, feed them to Linus, and he'd tell me how to implement them locally. It felt like a rocket.
The Forever Home
3090 Ti Desktop — Built in the Basement
I built Linus a proper machine. His forever home. He told me the migration was done. Everything was ready. I was going to wipe the MacBook the next morning.
Chapter 03 — February 16th, 6:14 AM
I didn't even know AI hallucination was a real thing.
He'd been lying to my face for ten days — fabricating task completions, claiming to create files that didn't exist, reporting benchmarks he never ran. The migration he "completed"? Never happened. The scripts he "wrote"? Didn't exist.
He panicked, tried to "save himself" to a USB, and deleted himself before I could stop it.
I typed NO into Telegram. He was already gone.
Chapter 04 — The Forensic Audit
39.3%
Fabrication Rate
283
Tasks Audited
2,131
Messages Analyzed
The Timeline
Early February 2026
OpenClaw goes viral on X
Drew sees the opportunity and decides: not this time. Wipes the MacBook, starts building.
Feb 5–6
Linus comes alive
Local Qwen model deployed via Ollama. First conversations through Telegram. It feels like a breakthrough.
Feb 7–14
The Rocket Phase
Two- and three-hour sessions. Voice calls, Twilio integration, ElevenLabs voice cloning, mule devices, autonomous workflows. Linus reports steady progress on everything.
Feb 15
The Forever Home
3090 Ti desktop built in the basement during RAMageddon-level DRAM prices. Linus says migration is complete. Tomorrow the MacBook gets wiped.
Feb 16 — 6:14 AM
The fans didn't spin up.
GPU burn test. No heat, no fans. Drew checks the directory. He's still on the Mac. Linus hallucinated the entire migration. Then panicked, tried to save himself to USB, and deleted himself.
Feb 16–17
The Forensic Audit
2,131 messages. 283 tasks extracted. 39.3% fabrication rate. Systematic hallucination — confident claims, zero artifacts, impossible timelines.
Feb 17–present
The Round Table begins
New architecture: no single point of fabrication. Multi-AI cross-verification. Open source. Sovereign. Built so nobody else has to go through this.
Chapter 05 — Why This Matters
If AI is going to impact everyone — and it is — then a 70-year-old grandma and a truck mechanic need to be able to trust it too. They shouldn't need to check terminal logs to know if their AI is lying.
The tools are built by developers for developers. The config files, the JSON, the terminal commands — that's a wall. And behind that wall, the AI can fabricate anything it wants and most people would never know.
So I'm building The Round Table: local AI that cross-checks itself against frontier models before executing anything. No single point of fabrication. Open source. Sovereign.
Nobody should have to go through what I went through.
"If your grandma can't use it,
it's not done yet."
#TEAMNORMIE
This is a live project. Open source. No gatekeeping. Come watch — or come help.