Dragoon Mountains Ranch Sunrise
N0CVP Dragoon Mountains, Arizona

Craig Vandeputte

Engineering leader and builder. Personal AI, real systems, and a ranch at the end of a dirt road in the Dragoon Mountains.

About

I live and work on a ranch in the Dragoon Mountains of southeast Arizona with my wife, Sheridan — horses, dogs, chickens, a hydroponic garden, and more uptime monitoring than any household needs.

I've led engineering organizations for seventeen years without ever letting go of the keyboard. These days most of what I build is personal AI: agents that run real parts of a real household, on hardware I can see from my desk.

The office runs on its own solar; the writing here runs on what I learn keeping all of it alive.

I'm also a ham radio operator — N0CVP — which is its own kind of building: antennas, propagation, and patience.

Craig on horseback in tall golden grass, the Dragoon Mountains behind him
Out with Porsche, the palomino.

Writing

I keep notes here — personal AI, building systems that survive contact with reality, and the occasional dispatch from the ranch. RSS if you'd like them as they land.

September 1, 2026 Latest

Does your agent have principles?

Three incidents from my home agent fleet — a 1.7 GB runaway file, a hardware key that proved presence but not consent, and a broken agent with a spotless audit trail — turned into three principles instead of three patches. What that chain looks like end to end.

Projects

Live & Personal

Corral

One window for every agent I have running, and one rail for everything waiting on me — plus the fleet, the spend, and every note I've written in the same search box.

Free & Public

AI-OS

The on-ramp. One prompt that turns Claude Code into a personal AI operating system — free, public, novice-friendly.

MIT · Alpha

AI-OS Seed

The floor under it — a secrets vault that fails closed, a scheduler, a run log, and a check that notices when a job goes quiet. Generated from the live ranch system, not written about it.

Free to Read

Dragoon Mountains Growing Guides

Seventeen guides to growing food at 4,700 feet on the east side of the Dragoons — peppers to pomegranates, soil to table. Written for this ground, where the water is hard and the winter window runs backwards.

Family

Two Rivers

My family in four headwaters — Elizabethtown, Grand Ronde, Flanders, Ohio. Traced through state archive certificates, the Belgian civil registers of one village, the census rolls, a Wisconsin probate file, and a county history written by a member of the family in 1901. Written for my mother.

Amateur Radio

N0CVP QSO Explorer

An interactive Great Circle world map visualizing 6,869 radio contacts across 202 DXCC entities made from St. David, Arizona (DM41vv), with distance, azimuth, and time-lapse propagation playback.