Eli Heuer AI for type design does not need to happen in the cloud. Small models run on a laptop,
and a PC with a good GPU can do serious work. Local AI puts the user in full control of every part of the process and demystifies the technology involved. Anyone can train new models from scratch, fine-tune them, and use open-weight models. It is less complicated than it looks from the outside.
Runebender is an open-source, cross-platform font editor written fully in Rust that runs,
trains, and fine-tunes models on your own machine. An included ComfyUI-like node editor lets designers build AI workflows visually, and the editor is designed from the ground up to be extended with both cloud and local AI agents.
The designer and developer of the current version of Runebender (elih.net) will demo setting the editor up for local AI work, training and fine-tuning small models, using open-weight models, and building workflows in the node editor.
Format:
Short demo followed by a hands-on workshop. The demo shows the Runebender font editor and how it can use and create local AI models on both Mac and Linux.
The workshop gets Runebender set up and local models running on the attendees’ own machines. A simple DMG for Mac should be available by then and it is just a few commands in the terminal on Linux and Mac for people who want to modify the editor themselves.
Anyone with a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex can point it at runebender.org and have it do the setup. Once set up, anyone can easily use local models to edit fonts, train new models from scratch in the editor, fine-tune models, and make new workflows using a ComfyUI-like node editor that is built into Runebender.