Pip.cpp

Build something.
On your own machine.

The lessons explain what local AI is. These are the things you can make with it — working software, built step by step, that runs entirely on your computer. Each one also carries the Claude Code and Codex instructions that will scaffold it for you, because building with an agent against your own model is the part worth learning twice.

Start with the workflow Back to the lessons
  • 4 projects, 23 steps in all
  • Roughly 6 hours of building
  • Free to read, no account needed

Before you start

The workflow comes first

Twenty minutes on where an agent fits, what to tell it, and how to read what it hands back. Every project after this one uses it.

Building with an agent, against your own model

How to use Claude Code or Codex to write the app, while the app itself runs on the model on your desk.

20 min

The projects

Four things to build

In the order they get harder. Each one ends in something that runs on your own machine, and each one carries the instructions that get an agent to scaffold it for you.

A Pip chick cheering

Step 1

Start here

your first working thing

1 project about 1 hour

A Pip chick settled into an armchair

Step 2

Once you are comfortable

more moving parts

2 projects about 3 hours

A Pip chick in a toga, mid-argument

Step 3

Ambitious

something you will keep using

1 project about 3 hours

Where you are

Your workbench

A Pip chick with a map, setting out

Nothing built yet

0 of 4 built

Ticking a step is your own note to yourself. Nothing here looks at your machine.

Projects built
0 of 4
Steps ticked
0 of 23
Time to build the lot
about 6 hours

Your progress is kept in this browser. Sign in and it moves to your account, added to whatever is already there. Nothing you have ticked is lost.

Building, not reading

How the projects work

A lesson ends in a check you can pass. A project ends in software that runs on your own machine, against your own model, on files you would never upload anywhere.

Steps you can check
23
Written for both agents
Every one
Needs an account
No
Costs to run
Nothing
  1. A verify step how you know it worked, before you build on it
  2. Code you can copy named by the file it belongs in
  3. Claude Code and Codex the instruction that scaffolds it, for each
  4. A review checklist what goes wrong in what an agent writes
  5. Somewhere to take it deliberately unfinished

Every project walks you into at least one thing that genuinely goes wrong with a local model — a context window that will not fit, an embedding that needs a prefix, an answer that should have been a refusal. Those are the moments the course exists for.

Free to read and free to build. You never need an account, and nothing you write here leaves your computer.

Start where you are

The first one is 45 minutes

Read the workflow guide first if you have not built with an agent before. Otherwise go straight to it.

Start with the first project

Stuck on a step, or found something on this page that is wrong? Email info@redroostertec.com and a person will answer.