Wabash, Indiana — Since the first light
Jim Haist
I've run restaurants, IT operations, and production infrastructure. These days I put that operator's eye on what AI actually changes — for organizations, and at home.
I've run restaurants, IT operations, and production infrastructure. These days I put that operator's eye on what AI actually changes — for organizations, and at home.
I serve nonprofit organizations in board advisory and leadership advisory capacities.
I take on a small number of select implementation projects with partner organizations — structured deliberately to generate honest performance data on what AI actually delivers, and what it doesn't.
This is service and evidence-gathering, not a storefront — the work above isn't generally available, and there's no pitch attached to it.
I'm the founder of wabash.ai — an AI-literacy initiative in its infancy, being stood up to promote responsible and efficient use of AI for all.
I build and run the technical side of it personally — the site, the tooling, the systems underneath — the same way I approach everything else in this work.
If you're curious what responsible, efficient AI use actually looks like in practice — not the hype, not the doom — that's what wabash.ai is for.
Visit wabash.ai →“First Light” — In 1880, Wabash, Indiana became the first city in the world lit entirely by electricity. A small town proved new technology could work, in public, before anyone had to take it on faith. wabash.ai is the same idea, aimed at AI instead of electricity.
Wabash, Indiana. Clear to the stone.
The lab from the BSides talk didn't stop at the stage.
At home I run a private family cloud on my own hardware — media, files, identity, home automation — operated day-to-day with AI agents rather than by hand. It's the working successor to the lab in the talk, and it's the proving ground: I don't recommend anything anywhere else that I haven't already run here first.
A talk I gave at BSides Fort Wayne 2026.
The short version: I spent about $200 a month on an AI subscription and, over a few months, worked my way from three servers in a spare room to a real, running platform — Kubernetes, a secrets vault, single sign-on, active threat blocking, GitOps, the whole stack. I didn't set out to give a talk about it; I just kept building, and eventually had something worth explaining honestly, mistakes included. That's what the talk covers.
I'm not selling anything here. If it's about wabash.ai, start there — that's where the actual work lives and the best way to reach the project.
If you just want to say hi, ask about the talk, or something else entirely, the form works too.
Based in Wabash, Indiana