Private AI: Self-hosting an AI Chatbot on Your Local Network

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:25:00 +0200

I’m a firm believer that the future of AI is private deployments. By concentrating so much power in the hands of a few corporations we will inevitably find ourselves in a dystopian future.

Some time ago I started to wonder: what would it take to self-host my own “Claude” or “ChatGPT”?

Most of the time I use LLM chatbots as a very advanced search engine. But what I actually need it for is to help me navigate numerous documents written in legal German (as if regular German weren’t difficult enough, people invented the legal version of it). Obviously, the problem here is privacy. Under no circumstances can I trust my personal documents to a third-party.

Code Maintainability Is Not Always a Technical Problem

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 18:19:58 +0200

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First, who am I to even talk about it? What is my background?

I’ve been building software for the last 15 years. I’ve worked at 8 companies ranging from small startups to one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

At the moment I primarily work on Beats. A few facts about this repository (July 2025):

~15 teams work on it
918 unique contributors (including external ones)
4,183 Go files
653,168 lines of code
45,205 pull requests

So, it’s a relatively big project with quite a few people working on it. Let’s take my path from onboarding to the present day as an example for this article.

Technology on rdner's blog

Private AI: Self-hosting an AI Chatbot on Your Local Network

Code Maintainability Is Not Always a Technical Problem

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