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Precisely ! Not coding , not design - prompt writing ! Even that as you say can written by a more capable llm . Limitation is now human imagination!!!!

Thanks Craig. A difficulty I have is that the frame I am using is designed around a 44mm thick door and consequently the recesses are 47mm deep. There is no room to fit a bead in with a triple glazing unit. What I was thinking of doing was adding a timber piece (dark brown ) to the back of the frame that extends over the edge of the glazing panel and effectively forms the bead. Unlike pins in a normal bead scenario which are loaded perpendicular to their length, any fixings in that additional piece would be loaded along their length, so pins would pull out. I could use screws, but they would end up visible which I don't want (oak finish). The clips seem like a good solution since the bead ends up just being cosmetic as I understand it. I realise I could extend the frame by gluing timber on which is no wider that the frame already is and then use a conventional timber bead, but that would mean I would have to extend the frame more. I expect a suitable bead would be at least 15mm whereas I can have a much thinner back piece (dark brown) if it's only cosmetic and clips are doing the work of holding the panel. It's shown below as 12mm, but could go thinner.

Yes, there's definitely been some big changes over the last few months. It seems to have been exponential and the quality of output and reasoning is noticeable. Prompting though I still really key. I did a comparison last week with my son who'd put in a prompt and received some fairly generic stuff back. I sat down and wrote a prompt and he was taken aback by how long and detailed the prompt was compared to his. Then he was blown away by the output compared to what he had received. I actually ask the AI to create prompts for me or guide me in how best to structure prompt based on what I want and like @Pocster experiences, the output can be like night and day. Often just writing my prompts takes much longer than the thinking and generating the output.

For a little comfort. We put this stair in as temporary access. The post is really too small to bear directly on the screed. A permanent solution will be to have a much bigger bearing area by plate, or by forming a footing in place of insulation. But do notice that after a couple of weeks of burly builders and carrying materials, there is no damage and the screed is only 40 to 50 thick. So it's not a panic but does need a considered solution, as already discussed.

Have you considered just using glazing beads and hidden fixings though the bead and finish with glazing tape and silicone bead around the glass? The beads are generally what hold the glass in please.

Careful where you might end up...

Oh absolutely! Remember “ i’m free “ not in an are you being served way ! 😂 . No budget limit ( well maybe a bit ) , no time constraint , no boss ( like my build ) so able to explore and experiment! . Create what I want . Equally my house is the sandbox and I’m the guinea pig ! . Perfect setup for the experiment!!

Not at all, I'm focussed on using the most effective tool that requires the least amount of effort to get what I what done, working how I want it to work and it's reliable without too many bugs - and it can be maintained with minimal input, including completing regular security reviews of the implementation and doing what's necessary to lock it down. Now what I love about it is that quite regularly Claude has the audacity to add surprising things and functionality I hadn't thought about, making things even better that I'd asked! I can hardly contain my excitement about this too. No more brain hurt and squiffy eyes at 3am. And gets bigger all the time, I hope. Totally agree. I was listening to an AI podcast the other day and was surprised about the discussion talking about small scale efficient models running on very little computing power. The really interesting thing was that the guy (one of the gurus of our time in this field) was saying that the focus of the big data centre huge resource hungry things is more about stroking egos and the assumption that everything has to be bigger and better and more powerful all the time. It's a specific design decision rather than a necessity.

😊👍

I think there’s confusion here 😊 I want local - even ( obviously that a cloud based version ) is best . i use ChatGPT as my cloud based reasoner and sometimes coder for unlimited tokens ( effectively ) for £20 a month . It’s also my ‘chat’ for architecture / design / free balling ideas . That coupled with local Deepseek / qwen ( when needed ) is working fine . Home assistant can do some of this yes ; Alexa can do some of what I want . But I want to go beyond that … as examples ” it’s hot in here isn’t it Avalon ? “ ” how often was the gate opened last Tuesday Avalon ? “ ” Avalon , play that album by Coldplay I played yesterday “ then …. we get reasoning and memory for example on when to put the radio on . I.e a weighted graph ( doesn’t require an llm admittedly) based on occupancy, time of day , whom is in the room etc Ilm linked to camera above kitchen worktop to see the ingredients and suggest / recognise the meal . leading to stt permanently. SWMBO mentions “ bathroom light didn’t come on again “ this is stored and can referenced later . “ I need to order a usb cable “ . Again stored / referenced . My email checked for the Amazon order etc local llm , home assistant , ip camera , voice/speech recognition all part of the bigger picture . My “ to do “ list is long . Then we move into a humanoid robot to physically do tasks . You guys are focusing on “coding “ that bits solved . I never need to code again . So any method that’s cheap and/or local is perfect . The big picture is much much bigger !! < evil laugh > 😆

Everything I'm seeing suggests that the world has changed somewhat over the last 4 months or so, so if you haven't tried with codex 5.3/opus 4.6 then you might have the wrong mental model of where things are.

Anthropic just announced a big increase in number of tokens included in their subscriptions. OpenAIs codex is already generous (apparently). So maybe worth another look. Seen plenty of people talking about techniques for minimizing token usage. This is the thing that confuses me the most about your plan (not that you have told us much detail). Home Assistant can already do this can't it? (some features need a live cloud connection but some don't IIRC). Even if the operational side of your plan needs a local LLM, the coding/development aspect is one of the hardest aspects of LLM use that the frontier providers are better at. So your best value for money might be using them to do the development and then using a smaller, less memory hungry local llm to do the basic daily interactions. (Should be possible to design it so it can call out to a bigger subscription model for 'hard' problems). Having said all that, if you are enjoying the process, have the spare money for the hardware then do what makes you happy.

As an aside a few months ago whilst testing models with chat we defined some test spec and did a prompt for it . The coder produced ok code but a bit amateurish. Chat then re did the prompt . The coder model code was much more robust and professional- on my level ! . Went back to chat and did a full deep prompt . The coder then produced top grade software engineering code . I could do that , but it would take weeks . Chat was demonstrating a poor prompt is more problematic than a poor coding model . So I make sure prompts are solid !

My issue was cost per month for number of tokens I use . Also I need llm local to do stt realtime . I’m not suggesting local models match frontier yet ( if ever ! ) but with a bit of workflow adjustment you can get pretty far . ChatGPT plus blows my mind for £20 a month . This I use as my co boss to check everything . I think the media gets obsessed with “ the best “ - but you get to a point where it’s clearly good enough for your needs . I’ve done advanced physics / rendering / maths solely with ChatGPT and it was fantastic . Required work to get it to do it correctly and not (expletive deleted) up . So I’ve changed my workflow ; it’s now better and more efficient. Ultimately I’ll ditch ChatGPT when my local reasoner is good enough . Like all cloud based stuff , line drops , timeouts , stalls , delays I.e workflow rather than model issues wasted more time than a slow model !

I know why you want to avoid the cloud, but for a little compromise and a good few grand saved, I have to say that Claude Code is probably at the front right now. Have you tried it? I've tried Deepseek, which is pretty bloody amazing too but the way that Claude can build an entire stack, spit out all the relevant code in files, plus the debugging capability just has me flawed. The other advantage is persistent memory across conversations and chat history, including file retrieval - so you can put in all your skills and provide a context that gets updated as you work. Deepseek gets a bit of a pain because as soon as you notice the context memory starting to degrade, you've got to create a new prompt with current context and paste it into a new chat. Really don't get on with ChatGPT. Last summer when I was designing a DB schema and doing it the good old fashioned way with manual normalisation etc. it was just taking forever. Put my requirements in along with a decent prompt and it spat out the schema in about 3 minutes including all the relationships keys and foreign keys in an svg too, plus it then writes all the sql. What's amazing is then how it points you to tools available and takes you through how to integrate and implement them you'd never have heard about without weeks of trawling various tech sites. It is absolutely incredible. Do you not find that you still have to do a little stitching in of code and a little nudging for debugging though? So you need to make sure the code is properly commented - that's been the thing with Claude for me is that it makes sure the necessary commenting is in there - Deepseek stitching in was a bit more painful as the line numbers it gave me were always quite a way off, well actually a lot as I still have a 3/4 finished app on there and I can't quite face going back to resolve the bugs right now. But I think with all these tools, you still have to properly keep them on track as they do tend to forget stuff and when you're dealing with mathematics and especially applied physics, you've got to be very careful.

Honestly! As an ex software engineer I’m stunned ! We binned qwen coder . Too many silly errors . Uma8 microphone array up and recognises “ hey jeaves “ - tomorrow custom wake word . Seems stable as is but will leave running overnight. Have a fully fledge subscription protocol running so any new features easy to add and unlikely to bust anything else . So the Skeleton seems good ! stt should be easy . Was going porcupine route but it’s subscription so went openwake and whisper . My rules is no cost and no cloud - (expletive deleted) that ! To build an entire system with me manually doing zero coding is still insane 🤯

I messaged him direct said he’d do it for 27k outside ebay 😂😂😂😂

Not at all jealous. Not one single ...spit ... bit

Global radiator library now added which include Stelrad classic compact catalogue and Kartell K-Rad Kompact - all from K1/Type 11 to K3 Type 33. More to come from other manufacturers.

OK. I have never put in any drainage. I guess I would have imagined the socket needed an angle so that a pipe pushed squarely in against the seal would follow an appropriate fall ? I guess there must be quite a lot of play in the seal joint then. I have a 4m pipe run from my kitchen waste drain which it would probably be wise to somehow check/test before it has stuff going through it. How can I check the fall ? Would somehow need to measure the relative height of the pipe bottom at both ends ? Or shine a laser down it ?

Great. Thanks everyone. I'll carry on with my pretty panel.

I bough one of these when we started the built. On mine the sides and front fold down flat for extra carrying capacity. Can't believe how useful it's been:

@craig Have you come across these clips before? Any thoughts?

We bought one of those a couple of months ago. We've shifted several tons so far, including 150 sandbags filled with soil. The garden varies in height by 16m, so with lots of slopes and terraces it's knackering using a normal wheelbarrow. Wish we had bought one earlier.

Some chanber bases have built in fall - from the fan towards single outlet. But the small diameter of a domestic IC means fall isn’t worth considering … only fall on pipe runs between points.