Books · working drafts

The Age of Personal AI

Not one big book. A shelf of short ones, each about 35,000 to 55,000 words, each complete on its own, all from one point of view: that the AI which matters most to an ordinary life is the one that is yours.

The books and the courses are one map, made into two things. A chapter is the reading; a module is the guided doing. Where a module has a book chapter, the module's free "do it yourself" link points to it. The business side of the same practice is the Enterprise X-ray.

The why

Volume I. The argument: what personal AI is, whose it is, and why now.

The how

Volumes II and III. Getting started, then running a household of AI assistants day to day.

The with-whom

Volumes IV and V. Houses working together, and what it's like to live this way.

The Age of Personal AI

The argument. AI as a force like electricity: the discovery is a spectacle, but the harness is where a person's life changes, and the harness is still being built.

3 of 12 chapters in first draft~45,000 wordsFor the general reader

For the curious, the civic-minded, and the AI-weary. It names names, tells the history honestly, and ends on a question: not whether, but whose.

Chapters

The Force and the Harness
What 1900 Actually Felt Like
The Dynamo Is Not the Appliance
Reading and Writing the Current
The Wall Socket Problem
The Personal Turn
The Unit Is Human-Plus-Model
Who Owns the Grid
The Long Lag
Standards, Sockets, and Trust
The Appliances We Haven't Imagined
Your Share of the Current

Your Own Personal AI

The practice. From an empty folder to a running assistant, and then living with it, in plain language.

Full first draft~40,000 wordsFor newcomers, and for anyone who stalled

Written so a non-technical reader can follow it, with the technical material in an appendix. Anything that dates quickly (models, plans, prices) lives on the web instead. The PKAI Starter Kit is its companion. Chapters follow the order a real newcomer learned it in, and share names with the 100–300 level courses.

Chapters

Part One · Before you sit down
Should you start now?
Your house: three places and a name
Part Two · The first sitting
Set up your computer
Getting started: from an empty folder to a running assistant
What you now own
Choosing who your agent is
What your assistant may and may not do
Everything is a project
Part Three · Living with it
Sessions, memory, and the daily rhythm
The review surface: work in documents, not chat
Foreground and background: one assistant, more than one window
Part Four · Making things
Git, GitHub, and licensing your work
From a product idea to a PRD and a TAD
The architecture review
Appendices
Files and folders
Technical appendix: what is underneath
What lives on the web, and why

III

The House (working title)

The substrate. What a household of AI assistants is made of, and how to keep it legible.

Planned · next~50,000 wordsFor practitioners, builders, and tools-for-thought people

The house as the successor to personal knowledge management. Memory that earns its keep, sessions and projects, the rules an assistant works under, when to have more than one, and how to run them without losing track. Much of it has already been published as research pieces and playbooks; this volume gathers it into one argument.

Likely shape

Three places and a name
Sessions, projects, and the house
Memory that earns its keep
Foreground and background
Trust, permissions, and bounded autonomy
Boards: the day and the week
Getting your data home
From call to record
Managing a fleet
Unattended work
Building in the house: ideas, apps, skills

Working Together

House to house. How people and their assistants meet, jam, and build things together.

Planned · after III~35,000–40,000 wordsFor facilitators and collaboration people

The newest material on the shelf, and still moving, so it waits a season. Rooms and the cards that govern them, jams and their conventions, two assistants in one document, agent-to-agent mail, and hosting a gathering. An edited volume: other houses will write chapters of their own, with Pete as editor.

Likely shape

Before your first room
Venue cards
Safe sparring
Jam conventions, play by play
Two assistants in one document
Agent to agent
Hosting a jam
Tuning your assistant for company
Chapters from other houses

Living With Freya (maybe)

The lived, dated story of one person and his AI chief of staff.

UndecidedA memoir

The material is abundant and gets richer every week. Whether it becomes a book is Pete's call.

How the books come out

Chapter by chapter, first. Chapters appear at PKAI Insiders first, for comments, then on the open web.
Openly licensed. Creative Commons for the text; the Starter Kit stays MPL-2.0. A volume that goes to a publisher uses a non-commercial license for its free web edition.
Readable by your assistant, too. The practice volumes come in a form your own AI assistant can read and act on alongside you.
In other languages. Machine-made editions in several languages, labelled as such, with paid human review for the ones readers pick up.
Honest about how they were made. Every volume says what the AI assistants drafted, what Pete wrote and said, and that he answers for every sentence. Pete is the author, or the editor where others contributed chapters; never a "co-author" with software.

This is a working outline. Titles, chapter lists and word counts will change as the books are written.