AI in the Heartlands

TL;DR ​

AI in the Heartlands is a hands-on course brought to you by Aijutsu with the objective of empowering the everyday man-on-the-street to use AI to build things for themselves and their communities.

These are the course materials for "AI in the Heartlands" presented by Aijutsu. All materials are open-source and you are free to follow along without paying for the workshops if you'd like. But again, if you'd like the workshops are priced at an affordable rate and you get to meet others like yourself, ask us questions about applying these concepts in the industry, and get help with the nitty-gritties which tends to happen since course materials can only account for the majority.

• Workshop info is available at https://aijutsu.dev/ai-in-the-heartlands
• The source for these materials is on GitHub at https://github.com/aijutsu/aith

Pre-requisites ​

1. ChatGPT Plus subscription plan or Claude Pro subscription plan (~$30/month)
2. A laptop with >= 8GB RAM with full administration privileges

Course Overview ​

1. Building community agents with NanoClaw
   1. Introduces a basic developer setup
   2. Introduces basic agent harness components: model, tools, and data
   3. Introduces a basic integration using Notion as a data store
2. Building personal websites
   1. Introduces a slightly more advanced developer setup
   2. Introduces plugins to modify harnesses' behaviour for frontend
   3. Introduces basic static deployments with Github, Cloudflare, and Wrangler
3. Building personal automations
   1. Introduces Routines in Claude/Scheduled Tasks in ChatGPT
   2. Introduces manual harness modifications and indication of preferences
4. Building agentic workflows
   1. Introduces workflow engines via Trigger.dev
   2. Introduces non-relational databases (MongoDB) and file storage (Cloudflare R2) for data storage
   3. Introduces MCP servers as a way to interact with services
5. Building mini SaaSes
   1. Introduces a full developer setup with herdr
   2. Introduces standard deployments via DigitalOcean/Cloudflare
6. Building a homelab
   1. Introduces self-managed infrastructure
   2. Introduces security and compliance principles
   3. Introdces deploying your own model via Ollama
7. Deployments, security, compliance, and operations

Glossary ​

New words used in the course are explained in the Glossary.