Third Post's the Charm- Lack of Recent Updates

I haven't posted or made any updates on Wilmer in like a month, and then I suddenly dropped 3 blog posts all at once. If that doesn't tell you that I don't pay attention to things like trying to game SEO, not sure what does =D

The reason it's been quiet on my end is a mix of work (a couple of work trips + me being heads down trying to knock something out) but also some new projects I'm working on, built on top of Wilmer. I do plan to open source most, if not all, of these, so I'm not just talking about it here and never sharing. I still have a bit more work and testing to do first, but just know that the below list is the result of what I've been doing for the past year or so.

I'm mentioning this now because these projects are why Wilmer updates have been quiet. I know with it being an older project and the world having moved on to giant workflow apps like n8n or over to general agentic stuff like OpenClaw (lol, I know... I know...), most of you probably would have expected me to tap out some time back. But I actually spend a TON of time during my weekends still working on Wilmer and some offshoot projects. For right now, most of the updates and work I've done are specific to those projects, so I can't put it out there yet, but I definitely plan to soon.

Here's a few, but not all, of the things I've been working on since last summer. Not going into implementation detail yet here, as I'd like to wait until they are released or, at a minimum, I can write a devoted blog post per item with the deeper details.

• A fully offline knowledge search and deep researcher. With this, I intend to deprecate the Offline Wiki API project on GitHub (setting it to archive mode, most likely), as this new project is vastly improved in the response quality and is also stand-alone. The amount of knowledge now spans far beyond just wikipedia, with my current setup having almost a terabyte of knowledge to pull from, as well as easy ways to expand beyond that. I'll write more about this after its release, but so far through my testing I've been getting some really acceptable results- factually correct answers across history, science, and coding; fairly close but not super reliable answers across medical and legal; haven't tested other topics yet. Speeds on an M2 Ultra using Qwen3.6 35b a3b are about 15-25s for a quick search and about 20-30 minutes for Deep Research. The project will come with instructions of where and how to get the data; it's all really easy to use and grab.

• A local web search and deep researcher. Similar to above, but this is designed to use web searches instead of the locally saved info

• A fully offline translation app, similar to Google Translate.

• A custom made front-end for myself, to replace Open WebUI and SillyTavern. This is something I've been really happy with so far, but Im not sure how much the broader audience will enjoy it so I may or may not release it. I essentially have captured all my favorite features from a whole range of front-ends, and dumped 90% of the unnecessary (for me) overhead that comes with ST or OWI. My goal was to make something that was a mix of all the best productivity features from open webui and claude.ai, but also be capable of supporting personas and group chats, since some of my main workflows are Roland and SomeOddCodeBot. (It felt ridiculous having my main productivity bases sitting in a front-end whose main logo is a cat girl). Also adding a lot of other little features, including integrations to the searches above

• A lean IT agent designed specifically to handle my common homelab use-cases that are getting annoying or repetitive for me to keep up with. May or may not share this, but will definitely do a write-up later.

I also have a few other things that are just personal tinkering projects outside of just this going on: like a SearXNG instance, porting Socb to the new frontend, putting together a separate custom system for Roland as I start to expand its capability with sub-agents, and a few other things that I'll be writing about in the near future as well. Next on my list, when the hardware comes in, is setting up an air-gapped tailscale endpoint.

My hobby mission remains the same: I want to make local AI as good as I can get it. As we see more of these cloud services starting to get more expensive, adding Identity Verification via untrustworthy vendors and all else: having something we can fall back on, even with weaker models, is still my #1 goal. I am relying on cloud based AI more often these days, but my tinkering focus is entirely local.

On top of that, despite the amount of hardware I have available, my goal is to work against the lowest common denominator in terms of hardware. I want to get the best value I can out of something like a 9b model, with the understanding that larger models will do even better.

As always, my tinkering time is almost entirely relegated to Saturday/Sunday, with my weeknights either being focused on my actual job or with studying, so things move slowly. Usually the only updates I might do on weeknights is if I get a dependabot alert for something pretty important looking; in those cases I might tackle that late on a weeknight. So with that said, please don't take bursts of silence as me stepping back; like the energizer bunny, I keep going... and going... and going. I've been at this for 3 years now, and I feel like I've only just started.