# Irv Cassio > Personal site of Irv Cassio — enterprise digital/retail technology, native macOS and iOS apps, agentic AI tooling, and *The AI Enthusiast*, a weekly AI briefing. Content is free to read and free to cite with attribution. Author: Irv Cassio (https://irvcassio.com) Canonical host: https://irvcassio.com Sitemap: https://irvcassio.com/sitemap.xml Crawler policy: https://irvcassio.com/robots.txt — all search and AI crawlers allowed. ## About Irv Cassio is a digital experiences and retail technology leader based in Cincinnati, Ohio, working at the intersection of in-store technology, enterprise IT and applied AI. His day-to-day problem is operational rather than experimental: keeping in-store technology reliable across large device fleets and many locations, where a failure is a customer-facing outage rather than a bug report. He writes *The AI Enthusiast*, a weekly AI briefing for retail and IT teams that tracks frontier model releases, agent tooling and the MCP ecosystem with linked primary sources. He builds and publishes native macOS applications for working with local and cloud models — among them Canopy Terminal, Crucible, Emberpane, Glade and ClaudeSwitch — and maintains hands-on reference material on running open-weight models on hardware you control. He is also active in the Cincinnati AI and technology community, including AI Literacy Day, Cincy AI Week and MidwestCon at the 1819 Innovation Hub. Location: Cincinnati, Ohio, United States (US-OH). Expertise: retail technology, digital signage and in-store systems, operational reliability at fleet scale, applied and agentic AI, AI-assisted development, Claude Code, Model Context Protocol, local and self-hosted LLMs, macOS development. ## Speaking Available for conference sessions, corporate briefings and team workshops — in the Cincinnati and Greater Ohio region and remotely. Audiences are typically retail technology teams, enterprise IT organisations and developer groups; formats run from a 45-minute keynote to a half-day hands-on class. Recurring topics: - People-Scaled AI for Retail Tech Teams — what changes when AI scales the people running stores rather than replacing the systems behind them. - Uptime Discipline for Digital Experiences — keeping in-store technology reliable across large device fleets and many locations. - From Dashboards to Action — turning fleet telemetry into decisions and automated remediation. - Practical AI for Enterprise IT — skills, MCP connections and agentic workflows applied to ticket triage and incident resolution. - Running Models Locally — a hands-on class on self-hosting open-weight models, from a laptop to an enterprise rollout. - Windows → macOS Migration — a 50-slide hands-on class for making a Mac a daily driver. Selected appearances: Digital Signage Experience (DSE) 2025; Cincinnati AI Literacy Day (AI 101 and Developer editions); Cincy AI Week. To enquire about speaking: https://irvcassio.com/#connect or https://linkedin.com/in/irvcassio ## References and training Evergreen material: reference decks and hands-on classes, kept current rather than dated to a week. - [Running Models Locally — From Your Laptop to the Enterprise](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/Local_Models-Getting_Started): A getting-started guide to running AI models on hardware you control. Ollama in about five minutes and why it is the right first step; which model to pick — Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for general use at ~21GB, Qwen3.8-27B for coding agents under Apache 2.0 with a 262K window — and what each actually costs in… - [Claude Code Skills Directory](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/Claude_Code-Skills_Directory): Complete listing of all installed Claude Code skills, plugins, and commands — with invocation, examples, and install info. - [The AI Enthusiast — AI Literacy Day · AI 101](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Literacy_Day-AI_101): Issue No. 04. The terms everyone gets wrong, the major models explained, and prompt engineering tips that work immediately. - [Windows → macOS — Migration Class](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/Windows_to_macOS-Migration_Class): A 50-slide hands-on class for moving from Windows to a Mac and making it your daily driver. The menu bar and Dock annotated, every Control Panel setting mapped to System Settings, installing apps with no wizard, printing and Print to PDF end to end, Mission Control and Spaces, the Unix half (zsh,… - [Cincinnati AI & Tech Community Guide](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8b43fe71-d0ad-4690-8a85-77a0ec6d5b21): A living directory of Cincinnati's AI & tech communities — find your people, your events, your next move. ## The AI Enthusiast — weekly AI briefing Semantic HTML articles, not slide decks: every issue is plain crawlable markup with NewsArticle, ItemList and FAQPage JSON-LD. Each story carries its announcement date, an audience tag, and linked primary sources. Vendor benchmark claims are labelled as vendor-reported; unconfirmed reports are labelled unconfirmed. - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, October 9, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-10-09): Issue No. 27. A feature guide to Claude Code Mods, launched October 1, 2026 in v2.1.287: JavaScript or TypeScript functions that run inside Claude Code's own process and can observe, rewrite or answer any event and draw panes and bands, with the docs' 25-line starter mod, the six built-in mods… - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, October 2, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-10-02): Issue No. 26. Claude Sonnet 5.5 (September 28), GPT-6.1 Sol (September 29) and Gemini 4 Argon (September 30) all list at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, yet on Artificial Analysis's suite a task costs $0.72 on Sol, $1.99 on Argon and $7.67 on Sonnet 5.5 at max effort. - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, September 25, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-09-25): Issue No. 25. Meta Connect 2026 (September 23–24) turned Meta's AI strategy into a full stack — the agent, the distribution, the hardware and the money. - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, September 18, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-09-18): Issue No. 24. Dario Amodei published 'We Must Pace the Frontier' on September 12, arguing AI capability is outrunning safety verification and that frontier labs should deliberately slow the rate of capability gain — 'We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models' — with a… - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, September 11, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-09-11): Issue No. 23. Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI each shipped a flagship inside 72 hours: Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 with cache reads cut 75% to $0.25/Mtok and an EU AI Act watermark, Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 with a Contributor tier that takes ~92% off the price in exchange for your prompts as training… - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, August 28, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-08-28): Issue No. 22. Anthropic previews the Model Hardware Standard so Claude can operate microscopes, liquid handlers and robotic arms — QuEra recovers a laser's operating frequency at a 99.3% success rate and Carnegie Mellon runs drug discovery ~3x faster — unifies Claude's memory across chat and Cowork… - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, July 10, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-07-10): Issue No. 18. The week the model release calendar exploded: OpenAI ships GPT-5.6 as a three-tier family (Sol, Terra, Luna) plus ChatGPT Work and programmatic tool calling in the Responses API, Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents, brings Cowork to mobile and web, and… - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, June 12, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-06-12): Issue No. 16. Claude Fable 5 ships as the first publicly available Mythos-class model and Riley Brown clones Lovable in 2 prompts, Apple's WWDC rebuilds Siri on Google Gemini, Microsoft Build unveils OpenClaw + MXC + Scout + 7 new MAI models plus the AI-designed Majorana 2 quantum chip, OpenAI… - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, June 5, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-06-05): Issue No. 15. Claude Opus 4.8 ships and catches 4x more bugs than 4.7, Anthropic files for IPO at a $965B valuation, Claude Code goes cloud-native with ultraplan and ultrareview, Google's Antigravity Agent and Gemini 3.5 Flash land in public preview, OpenAI rolls Dreaming V3 memory and a ChatGPT… - [The AI Enthusiast - Weekly Briefing, May 15, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Briefing-2026-05-15): Issue No. 14. Google's official pre-I/O Gemini packet, Claude for Small Business, Codex inside ChatGPT mobile, OpenAI's TanStack supply-chain response, and a source-backed comparison of OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, OpenHuman, and Hive's xBee architecture. - [The AI Enthusiast - Weekly Briefing, May 8, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Briefing-2026-05-08): Issue No. 13. Anthropic tightens its grip on premium coding and finance workflows, OpenAI shows how frontier firms are pulling ahead, Google pushes Gemini 3 Flash deeper into mass distribution, and ServiceNow turns MCP into governed enterprise action. - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, May 1, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Briefing-2026-05-01): Issue No. 12. 27 pages on what shipped this week: PocketOS losing its database to a Cursor-driven Claude agent in 9 seconds, Claude Security beta, Claude Design, Claude Code Auto Mode, MCP donated to the Linux Foundation at 97M installs, Gemini 3.1 hits 80.6% on SWE-Bench, MS-OpenAI restructure,… - [The AI Enthusiast — Weekly Briefing, Apr 17–24, 2026](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Weekly-2026-04-24): Issue No. 11. Claude Opus 4.7 ships with Managed Agents and Claude Design while Mythos stays behind glass via Project Glasswing. OpenAI pushes GPT-5.5 and Codex-for-everything. Qwen 3.6-Max and a 27B dense model that beats a 397B MoE. DeepSeek V4 Preview lands open-weight at 1.6T with 1M context. ## Talks and deep dives - [The AI Enthusiast — Claude Leaks: Lessons & What's Next](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/Claude_Leaks-Lessons_and_Whats_Next): Issue No. 10. The Claude Code leak, Project Glasswing, Managed Agents, practical Claude techniques, and a deep dive into Hive, Canopy, Brainpower, Glade, Beam, and the autonomous agent roadmap. - [The AI Enthusiast — Enterprise & Mobile Edition](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Enthusiast-Enterprise_Mobile_Edition): Issue No. 09. Trellis governance middleware for Claude Code — hooks, context preservation, cost visibility, SSH MCP, Hive orchestration, and Cincinnati AI Literacy Day events. - [The AI Enthusiast — Hive: AI Agent Orchestration Compared](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/Hive-AI_Agent_Orchestration_Compared): Issue No. 08. Full feature walkthrough of Hive and head-to-head comparison with Paperclip, OpenClaw, and Spacebot across orchestration, UI, approvals, and multi-model support. - [The AI Enthusiast — The Easy Button](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Enthusiast-The_Easy_Button): Issue No. 07. How AI Skills and MCP connections create the Easy Button for enterprise IT — instant ticket triage, automated incident resolution, and continuous learning. - [The AI Enthusiast — Local AI Models on Apple Silicon](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/Local_Models-Apple_Silicon): Issue No. 06. Comprehensive comparison of local models for autonomous coding agents across Mac tiers — with real-world RAM after macOS overhead, tok/s by memory bandwidth, and M5 Max/Ultra analysis. - [The AI Enthusiast — AI Literacy Day · Developer Edition](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Literacy_Day-Developer_Edition): Issue No. 05. Coding harnesses, project harnesses, context exhaustion, token economics, agentic coding, MCP, and the new AI-powered developer workflow. - [The AI Enthusiast — Real Application Edition](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Enthusiast-Real_Application_Edition): Issue No. 03. Perplexity Comet for testing, overnight legacy upgrades, Hive orchestration, AI safeguarding lessons, and context window insights. - [The AI Enthusiast — Workflow Edition, Part 2](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Enthusiast-Workflow_Edition_Part2): Issue No. 02. Deeper dive into AI-powered development workflows. - [The AI Enthusiast — Workflow Edition](https://irvcassio.com/presentations/AI_Enthusiast-Workflow_Edition): Issue No. 01. Overview on skills, automation, MCP servers, OpenClaw, and the Cincinnati AI community. ## Site - [Home](https://irvcassio.com/): overview, projects, and writing. - [Presentations and resources](https://irvcassio.com/#presentations): full archive of decks, briefings and references. - [Downloads](https://irvcassio.com/downloads): native macOS and iOS applications. - [Privacy](https://irvcassio.com/privacy): privacy policy for the apps and site. ## Citation Cite as: Irv Cassio, "
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