I'm looking for real-world experience here. I'm considering building a machine to serve a local LLM. I have a custom built machine with a Ryzen 5 and 32Gb of DDR5 sitting here unused for six months after a non-AI project was cancelled. Based on your own experience, what would I need to add to get decent local performance and what would be the best way to access remotely? What model should I use. I have a max budget of €3K additional

Found this GitHub repo that might be the official Fable 5 system prompt, reading through it is quite interesting. They made sure that Fable was as humane as possible. Here's the page if you're interested: https://github.com/elder-plinius/CL4R1T4S/blob/main/ANTHROPIC/CLAUDE-FABLE-5.md

That's the post. Build something today.

A CEO of an MSP that I've been one on one consulting on ICM sent this article to me this morning. Microsoft's SkillOpt automatically upgrades AI agent skills without touching model weights Repo: https://github.com/microsoft/SkillOpt The short version: instead of fine-tuning model weights, it treats your markdown skill files as the trainable parameter. It runs your agent against benchmark tasks, analyzes what went wrong, proposes bounded edits to the skill doc, and only accepts changes if held-out validation strictly improves. The deployed artifact is a single best_skill.md file — no extra model calls at inference. They're reporting +19.1 points on Claude Code benchmarks. That's output quality — the agent getting the right answer more often — not token savings. When I first started building skills in my ICM, they were bloated. Long, unstructured, burning tokens. If you're letting Claude build your skills for you (which is the natural thing to do), you're not necessarily getting an optimized artifact — you're getting whatever Claude thought was thorough at the time. The question SkillOpt is trying to answer: is the skill actually performing, or is it just big? Where I'm less sure it translates: most of the benchmarks are coding tasks, where "correct" is binary. I have three copywriters — Cash, Clyde, and Wradley. Scoring whether a piece of copy is better is a different problem. Harder to define, harder to gate automatically. Is this a layer worth putting on top of nuanced specialist work? Has anyone here dug into it?

Anthropic is holding free workshops in 10 cities as part of their Claude for Small Business tour. It's a half-day workshop and networking event, and all attendees get a free month of Claude Max. I just got the email confirming my ticket. Spring stops include: Chicago, Tulsa, Dallas, Hamilton Township, Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, San Jose, and Indianapolis. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business