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Hand-Me-Down AI
The Layman's Friendly Guide to Artificial Intelligence, Frontier Models, and the Path to Your Own Homelab
This book is 100% completeLast updated on 2026-11-13
The prequel to Hand-Me-Down Homelab. Free: everything you need to know about AI before you build anything.
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About the Book
Hand-Me-Down AI is the free prequel to Hand-Me-Down Homelab. It assumes you know nothing about artificial intelligence, computer networking or the command line. You don't need a computer science degree, calculus or Python.
The homelab book tells how old computers from drawers and closets became a small home datacenter, with an AI assistant that helps build and run it. An AI reads the house's alert mail at 6:32 every morning, keeps the notes on every machine, and writes down its own mistakes so it doesn't repeat them. That book assumes you already know your way around an AI assistant. This one doesn't.
By the time you finish, you'll use the world's most powerful frontier models with confidence, safety and frugality, and you'll have the mental foundation to pick up Hand-Me-Down Homelab and build your own home server.
Twenty-two chapters and four appendices, in five parts:
- Understanding AI: what a chatbot actually is, how it predicts text, why it has no memory between chats, and why it confidently makes things up
- Using AI: talking to it well, teaching it your own facts, and the three-rung Trust Ladder (ask, let it guide you, let it do the work)
- Cost, privacy and trust: what you're really paying for, ten money-saving habits, what never to paste into a chat box, and verifying what an AI tells you instead of trusting its confident tone
- AI for the family: using AI with kids, in the classroom, and with older relatives who've never tried it
- Toward the homelab: computers and networks in plain English, your first terminal, your first server, and whether you're ready for the next book
Every chapter has a true story from the homelab, checked against Hand-Me-Down Homelab and the lab's own records.
How this book was made: Luis Albisu set the project, the structure and the rules, and supplied the homelab and its records. Google's Gemini (via Antigravity) drafted it; Anthropic's Claude revised it. The book says so, because Chapter 15 says to.
It's free. Leanpub asks for an email address to deliver the book; its newsletters are optional. Updates and corrections reach the same free copy.
Author
About the Author
Luis Albisu
Luis Albisu built and runs the home lab in this book: mostly hand-me-down computers, a few Raspberry Pis, one new graphics card, and an AI assistant that keeps the notes, follows the house rules and writes down its own mistakes. He makes the Hand-Me-Down Homelab video series from the same lab, and he still reads the 6:32 triage email with his morning coffee.
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