Exploring AI with Purpose One System at a Time
Welcome to my AI lab notebook.
I build and document real AI systems: local infrastructure, agent workflows, voice pipelines, generative media experiments, and human-AI collaboration models.
Everything here is tested in practice — sometimes elegant, sometimes chaotic, often held together by stubbornness, iteration, and the quiet conviction that building things yourself is worth the suffering.
You will find experiments, projects, field notes, failures, benchmarks, and the occasional breakthrough that makes the whole lab light up.
This is applied AI in motion: built locally, observed carefully, and written with both engineering discipline and personality.
— EthanC AI Lab // Independent Applied AI Research
Latest from the Lab
Experiments, projects, field notes, and records from an independent applied AI lab.
A running notebook of experiments, systems, field observations and agents from the lab.
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From 5B Potato to 14B Frontier — Local Vidgen Finally Works
EthanC attempted local vidgen in Feb 2026 which proudly produced a potato with a face. Local vidgen was shelved. Three months later, pain forgotten, EthanC tried again with Wan 2.2 . 5 days of community archaeology later — Wan2.2 delivered 720p floating hair and billowy dress at 63°C. Haus is vindicated.
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Macro-chan Online — Building a Grounded Macro Layer
ForexWaifu needed a macro brain. The first attempt produced confident-sounding analysis that hadn't checked the news recently. The second attempt used Gemini's grounded search. Macro-chan came online. The yield curve explanations stopped. The actual macro intelligence started.
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Analyst-chan Online — Migrating ForexWaifu from CLI to Browser
This article continues from PROJ-004-A. The architectural realization happened there. The actual building happens here. This is where Analyst-chan comes online, the CLI gets retired, and the charts start having opinions.
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How a Trading-Partner Project Accidentally Became an Agent-System Laboratory
EthanC originally rebuilt ForexWaifu to improve an abandoned trading-assistant project. Instead, it accidentally became a controlled laboratory for exploring agent systems, orchestration architectures, modular cognition, and the strange emergence of “-chan” based AI ecosystems.
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The Cheese Moved the Cheese
EthanC asked Qwen7B-chan to play Detective. Qwen7B-chan cast herself as the Detective, the Sidekick, all four suspects - including the Cheese. The Cheese gave testimony. EthanC watched.