GoKawiilNo, We Have AI At Home
Chapter 1: A Box Of Scraps
August 13 2026
It's an interesting time to be a software dev; the transformer large language model is, in my opinion, the first really new and interesting technological development in the field in a long time. AI coding agents built on this have rapidly become core to working in this profession, and the feeling is kind of like going from doing woodworking with hand tools to using power tools, for better or for worse.
Me, I've only ever been able to trust a piece of technology if I can take it apart and put it together in my garage. The thing where you connect to a service and use a coding agent under somebody else's control bugs me; there's too many ways for this to go wrong. You'll start depending on it and then it'll get taken away from you. This whole technology is exciting, but I don't want to go and connect to some big AI data center somewhere; I want a little AI data center in every home! And we're in something of a computer parts shortage right now (or, maybe the late 2010s were a computer parts surplus?) so to keep things affordable, I'm going to have to build it out of garbage.
we're gonna put an AI data center in every home
The main thing I need here is a bunch of GPUs. I need fast memory going into something that does lots of parallel matrix math and that's what a GPU is. Like I said earlier, though: everything that's designed to run any AI workload at all, or even anything that's known to be good at it, is wildly expensive right now.
Back in 2022, a bunch of companies were trying to make the whole "cloud gaming" thing take off. You know, where you run your video games in a data center somewhere so you don't need to buy an expensive gaming PC or console. AMD took one of their workstation GPUs, gave it some extra RAM and removed all of the video outputs. They called the resulting card the "V620". It was never sold to the public, so you might not have heard of it. AMD wildly overproduced these things and then the whole cloud gaming thing didn't work out because of (in retrospect obvious) problems with lag.
These cards aren't really designed for AI workloads and AMD's software support is notoriously bad, so these things are relatively cheap to buy from the "used server hardware" e-waste resellers on eBay. I don't think the ones I got had actually ever been used, they look basically new. They each have 32GB of pretty fast VRAM. Sure, they have a reputation for being bad at the thing I want to use them for, but how hard can it be to get this to actually work?
Oh, they don't have fans, btw. They're server cards, they expect the server to cool them with some extremely loud blower fan. We'll get to that in a minute.
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