Vol. I · No. 10October 2026 · Boulder, Colorado

Mr Future

Bill McIntyre's personal blog on AI/ML engineering, learning, and experiments.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay, Xerox PARC, 1971

Invention

COLD STORAGE: a haunted data center adventure

An Infocom-style text adventure in Python, written entirely by a local model on a 16GB MacBook Pro. No cloud APIs in the loop.

By Bill McIntyre

An anonymous client bought an abandoned data center off the internet and hired you to fix its servers. The blast door sealed behind you. The building has been offline since the Great Outage of 1987, and the night shift, apparently, was never relieved. Your job: do your job, survive the hauntings, and get out.

COLD STORAGE was built for the local and sovereign AI workshop. The point was to show what a model running on an ordinary laptop can make: a MacBook Pro (M3) with 16GB of RAM, running Qwen3.8 27B, steered by me through the Pi coding harness with a few sandbox safety add-ons and a minimal AGENTS.md and skills setup to leave room for context.

The design, code, tests, debugging and even the jokes came from the model on the laptop.