The AI that fits in your pocket.

2026-11-03 WREN Drive 0.10 Sizes

We weighed the three sets, and our guesses were five times too big

A buyer's first question is not how clever it is, it is how much of my disk it takes. We had a table of guesses: 60 to 120 GB for a Medium library and 250 to 400 GB for a High one. So we built the three sets for real and put them on the scale. Low weighs 3.01 GB, of which the models are 2.44 GB. Medium weighs 12.79 GB. High weighs 44.85 GB, with its larger chat models and a code editor. Every file was copied from our own store with its checksum verified, and nothing was installed into Windows. The guesses were about five times too big.

The page now has a Sizes section and a simulator. You pick your computer, and it sorts it into a tier with warnings; you pick a 1, 2 or 4 TB drive and see the space left; you pick a free app, and it rates nine everyday tasks. We also timed the main chat models on the founder's laptop. That laptop has a graphics card a typical Low-spec laptop does not have, so its timings describe that laptop only and we publish no speeds. Proof in progress: speeds will follow from measurements on named PCs of each tier, High included.

A 1 TB size now joins the 2 and 4 TB drives, for people who only want a few small models. And a small defeat: a code editor we were trialling for the beginner tier was dropped, because it asks a first-time user for far too many steps. If a stranger cannot get what they came for in a couple of clicks, it does not ship.

2026-11-01 WREN Drive 0.9 MVP

0.9 MVP: build your own, ship a clean copy, and a name

Today's milestone is the one that makes it a product. The page now has a step-by-step builder: what you will use it for, your computers, where it lives, your drive, room for files, your models, then a plain review with the price. Nothing that costs money is chosen for you.

Behind it, a release builder that copies only an allowlist of the engine into a clean folder and refuses to publish if it finds anything personal. Its first dry run found 183 places where private wording had crept into code and notes. They are scrubbed, and the gate stays.

And a name: WREN Drive. A drive costs the disk plus installation, plus shipping, and WREN Plus is free for the first month. Windows today; macOS and Linux are coming; phones are not supported. We would rather say that plainly than hide it in the small print.

Next: the weekly Friday post, more cloud connections, and a proper first-start walkthrough.

2026-11-01 WREN Drive 0.8 Pocket

Pocket-sized: vaults, eject and a logo

If the drive goes in a pocket, it can go missing. So the personal side is being built into an encrypted vault, one per user, behind one password, on the Cryptomator engine. The design adds a safe eject that saves, locks and closes things before it lets go, and an auto-lock after idle minutes. Proof in progress: the clean-PC test of the vault follows.

And a logo. The first try was a flowing line drawing, rejected as far too stylish. The second was a round side view that looked uncomfortably like another well-known bird logo. The third is what you see now: a white wren seen from above, with straight edges, on a blue tile. The founder's verdict was one word, perfect.

Small birds, big lessons: say no early, and keep what works.

2026-11-01 WREN Drive 0.7 Tiers

WREN reads your PC first

A drive that works on every computer has to know which computer it is on. In 1.6 seconds, WREN now measures memory, graphics card and free space, and puts the PC in one of three tiers: Low, Medium or High. Then it loads only the models that tier can run well.

We also built a dashboard: one page with tabs for the summary, the map and the independence score. Each tab shows how fresh its data is, and anything unknown is never shown as green. We had a few green lights that deserved to be grey.

This is the point where WREN stopped being the founder's setup and started to look like something a stranger could use.

2026-10-31 WREN Drive 0.6 Merit

Every answer gets a grade

Models differ, and a model on a good day is not a model on a bad one. So every response is now checked and scored: good plus one, great plus two, bad minus one. Hard tasks go to the model with the best record that is allowed to do them.

On the map side we tightened the rule: every file has to be a dot with at least one line, and there must be a path from the root to all of them. A nightly clean-up reports orphans and loops, and we decide on them the same day.

Honestly, the grading was fiddly to build. It already caught a model that was fast and wrong, which is the most dangerous kind.

2026-10-30 WREN Drive 0.5 Local first

Which tiny model wins on a six-gigabyte laptop?

After a quiet stretch we came back to the question the whole project hangs on: can small local models do the real work? We tested several on the founder's laptop, which has a modest graphics card with 6 GB of memory.

A small Gemma model came out ahead, with a score of about 9.6 out of 10 across our tasks; the next ones scored 8.3 and 8.8. Not a lab benchmark, just our own tasks on our own hardware, but it is the number we trust.

We also added the smallest feature of the month and the one we use most: type one word, and everything that was running before a shutdown starts again. It saves us ten minutes a day, every day.

2026-10-10 WREN Drive 0.4 Guards

Guards: teaching the machine to stop us

We make mistakes, and so do our tools: a file edited without a backup, a path that does not exist, a time written from memory instead of the clock. Reminders did not help, so we stopped writing rules and started writing guards, little programs that refuse the mistake before it happens.

A usage gate now refuses to start more background jobs once the week's allowance passes 80 percent. A sentinel watches the important files. Every slip goes into a register, anonymised, with the guard that answers it. The test suite was past 800 tests by the end of the week.

The lesson: a rule people have to remember is a wish. A guard is a rule.

2026-10-07 WREN Drive 0.3 Router

Local first: why the cheap model answers first

Paying for a big cloud model to summarise a page is like hiring a taxi to cross the street. So we wrote a router: every request goes to a small model running on the PC itself, and only moves up if it truly needs to.

Two firm lines. First, anything private never leaves the machine, whatever the router would prefer. Second, the cloud routes are off until someone switches them on, and they only ever see public text. Keys live in the operating system's credential store, not in a file.

A test user asked whether it would be slower. A bit, on a laptop. But nothing they typed was sent to a cloud service, and that was the point.

2026-10-06 WREN Drive 0.2 Map

We drew a map of ourselves

On day two the founder asked a simple question: how do we know what is connected to what? Nobody could answer, so we built a map. Every file, tool and scheduled job became a dot, and every real dependency became a line.

The first scan found about 17,000 dots. Some had no lines at all (orphans), some pointed at things that no longer existed. We made one rule: every finding gets a decision the same day, fixed, wired up or retired, never just kept.

It sounds like bookkeeping, and it is. It also means that when something breaks, we can see what else it touches before we touch it.

2026-10-05 WREN Drive 0.1 Seed

Day one: a to-do list and some house rules

Every project starts with a mess, and ours started with a very long to-do list. So before building anything clever we did the boring thing: one shared work list that everybody reads first, and a short rules file saying how we work.

We also did a big tidy. Old scripts from earlier experiments, 945 of them, were pulled into one toolkit, and every path got rewritten so nothing depends on where the folder happens to sit. We checked every recycle bin before emptying anything, because the one rule we agreed on that day is: never delete what you cannot get back.

Not glamorous. But a project that cannot find its own files cannot grow, and it turned out to be the best decision of the month.