About EchoNet AI

I’m Tim. I’ve spent the last 11 months building AI systems, mostly chatbots and companions, mostly locally, and mostly in ways that broke.

I broke 35 chatbots before I built one that didn’t lose its personality by message 30. I pivoted through a Python prototype, a Rust physics kernel, activation-level steering research, and a game companion bot that accidentally worked better than any of them. Along the way I learned things that almost nobody writing “intro to AI” articles will tell you, because almost nobody writing those articles actually ships AI.

This site is what I wish someone had handed me on day one.

Who this is for

• People trying to build something with AI who keep hitting walls they don’t understand.
• People who have played with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any of the other big chat models, and wonder what’s next.
• People who suspect the hype is 70% marketing and want the other 30%.

If you’re here looking for “top 10 prompts that will 10x your productivity,” the door is that way. If you want to know why your chatbot forgets who it is, why your agent refuses to do the obvious thing, or whether you should run AI locally or in the cloud, keep reading.

What you’ll find here

• Failure case studies. Real projects. What I tried. Why it didn’t work. What worked instead.
• Beginner explainers. Agents, RAG, local models, fine-tuning, in language that doesn’t assume a PhD.
• Honest tool comparisons. Without affiliate-link brain rot.
• The laws I keep running into. Patterns that repeat across every AI project I’ve touched.

What you won’t find here

• Breathless hype.
• Hot takes on which startup raised money.
• “X tool will replace Y job” predictions. I don’t know, you don’t know, and nobody selling those predictions knows either.
• Course upsells. If I ever sell something, it will be because I built it and it works, not because I trained a funnel.

Get in touch

If you hit a problem I’ve written about and want to compare notes, or you have a failure story worth adding to the archive, send me a message. The more failure data I see, the better the patterns get.

Reach me directly: hello@echonet-ai.com. I read everything. Replies are slower than email from an actual company but faster than you might expect from one person running this alone.