Software and AI — built here, not bought in.

The approach

• Runs locally

  Language models, image and music generation run on Apple Silicon via MLX — no cloud dependency, no data that leaves the machine.

• Own finetunes

  Rather than wrapping someone else's API: five finetunes of my own on Gemma 4, Ministral 3 and Qwen-Coder — trained on datasets I built myself, not on off-the-shelf material. Model cards and data are public on Hugging Face.

• nCAI alignment

  A training approach of my own: the persona takes the place of a rulebook. Refusal behaviour, tone, tool use and coding style all follow from the character — alignment of a whole agent through who it is.

• Labelled

  What A!ley produces carries her name and is marked as AI-generated — watermarks and machine-readable metadata under the EU AI Act. Taking a persona seriously means naming her as the author, and saying plainly what she is anyway.

• The whole stack

  From model weights to UI pixel: training, inference backend, desktop app and web interface all come from one pair of hands.

Projects

Flagship

A!ley

AI assistant, IDE and creative sandbox in one

Not a chat companion but an assistance system with five finetunes of my own — from the 1 GB model that runs along permanently to the 14-billion-parameter model for thinking things through. Plus image, music and speech — and over 2,700 SVG artworks the language model writes itself, as vector code. One voice across coding, creative work and everyday things, and an idle thinker that carries on when nobody is writing.

MLXPythonNext.jsTauriPHP

In active development

FeatherWorks Author

Writing software for authors, with local AI

A Rust/Tauri application with Fonta!ne, an embedded Gemma 4 E2B model for entity recognition, style analysis and editing. Its own layout engine and InDesign export — the manuscript never leaves the hard drive.

RustTauriReactTypeScript

Own brand

Sex'n'Gears

A shared author site — two voices, separate work

The site of the author duo Simon van de Loo and Tris Khaylen. Both write independently: from Simon come the high-fantasy and steampunk series Tales of Martyria, The Marybeth Chronicles and Byxie Byx, from Tris Khaylen romance and dark romance. A book showcase with detail pages, a blog, a newsletter filterable by author and topic, smart search across the whole site — and in the Martyria wiki a full-text and location search of its own.

JoomlaYOOtheme ProCSS

Live in operation

VIDAhof e.V.

An association site for an animal sanctuary — live, and the proof for the image pipeline

Around 130 rescued animals at three locations near Kleve, a recognised learning site for animal welfare. The site brings in sponsorships and donations, shows animal profiles and carries a community: Joomla with YOOtheme Pro, a members' area, a forum, a donation flow. More interesting than the stack is the groundwork: 148 alt texts, the visual profile descriptions and the crops for over 200 photos came out of my own model — as coordinates that were taken over unchanged. Built pro bono; the association pays nothing.

JoomlaYOOtheme ProPHPMariaDBMLX

Showcase

Clearwater Cay

A design-system demo you can walk through in full

The glassmorphism design system “Depth & Light”: 76 design-token definitions across three themes (default, light mode, WCAG high contrast), kept entirely separate from the content. It began as the design for my IHK final examination — the best practical examination in the Koblenz district — and was rebuilt here from scratch: its own setting, its own images, its own copy, its own map.

HTMLCSSJavaScript

What comes next

Two plans with nothing running yet — here so the direction is visible.

• planned

  A!am

  An open offshoot of A!ley — the name from AI, “I am” and the exclamation mark. Same base models, but trained to take on a character, name included, from a handful of XML triggers in the system prompt instead of from page-long character bibles. Building a persona should require neither training nor programming knowledge. The idle thinker and the RAG memory come along; code, image, song and video can be loaded in as needed. It runs on people's own machines.

• planned

  H!ve

  A standalone product on related foundations: a suite for media design with image, video and audio generation. In place of the idle thinker's autonomy, Team Thinker v1 works here — several models finetuned for specific tasks that work towards one goal instead of roaming on their own.

What runs here

The stack behind A!ley — from the model layer up to the interface.

About me

Behind openM!nded Labs is Simon van de Loo — Digital Media Designer (IHK), graded “very good”, with the best practical examination in the Koblenz district. My first computer still ran Windows 3.11 — what I mostly learned from it was how to get along with awkward systems. Programming came a few Windows versions later by way of an RPG Maker: I wanted to build worlds and had to learn Ruby for it. Python and the web stack followed, Rust only during my retraining, because a teacher put it under my nose.

Professionally it went differently for a long time — twelve years in elderly care, then the retraining. What stayed throughout was writing: I am a published author several times over, focused on world- and character-building. Behind my Martyria universe stand over 600 pages of concept work since 2015 — currencies, calendars, a timeline, a glossary of people.

That is not a collection of interests but a chain — and it starts with worldbuilding, not with code. Whoever writes characters can build personas. Whoever programs can train them. In AI the two meet, and that is why my training data looks like manuscripts rather than tables.

The full CV, references and ways to get in touch are in the job-application portfolio.