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Heirloom Praxis
The commons

Learn this well enough to decide for yourself

Everything here is free and stays free. No email wall, no account, no drip sequence. If you read all of it and never speak to us again, the work did what it was for.

How these are written

Every guide states a capability and its limitation together. That is not caution for its own sake — the failures of this technology are not obvious from using it, because it is wrong in the same confident voice it uses when it is right. Knowing where the edges are is the literacy.

Foundations

Start here. No prerequisites.

What this technology actually is

No metaphors about brains. What these systems do, mechanically, and why that explains both the impressive parts and the failures.

7 min read

Limits

What it cannot do, stated plainly.

What it cannot do

The honest list. Worth reading before you spend money on anything in this field, including on us.

6 min read

For your work

Business, nonprofit, farm and land.

AI for a small business that is already busy

Where the hours actually are, which ones are worth handing over, and which ones are the business itself.

8 min read

AI for nonprofits and community organisations

Nearly every organisation already uses this. Very few see any impact. The gap is governance, and the gap is closable.

8 min read

AI for farms, gardens and land access

What is genuinely useful on a working piece of land, and where the confident-sounding answer will cost you a season.

7 min read

Governance

Privacy, policy and accountability.

Privacy, surveillance, and what never to type

A short, usable list you can hand to your staff this afternoon, and the reasoning behind it.

6 min read

Ownership

Rights, transfer and independence.

Creative work, rights and likeness

What you can control, what you cannot, and what to put in writing before you publish anything.

7 min read

Who owns what gets built

The questions to ask before you commission anything from anyone — including from us.

5 min read

Glossary

The words, in plain language

Every definition has a second line underneath it saying what it actually means.

Large language model

A system trained on very large amounts of text to predict likely continuations of a passage.

It has read an enormous amount and learned what usually comes next. That is genuinely useful and it is not the same as knowing anything.

Hallucination

Fluent, confident output that is factually wrong — an invented citation, a plausible statute that does not exist, a quote nobody said.

It makes things up in the same voice it uses when it is right. There is no tell. You have to check.

Training data

The material a model was built from.

If your work was on the open web, it may be in there. Removing it afterwards is not generally possible.

Prompt

The instruction and context you give a model.

What you asked for and what you told it. Most disappointing output is an under-specified request.

Data sovereignty

The principle that a community or organisation holds authority over information about it — how it is collected, held, used and returned.

Your information stays under your say-so.

CARE Principles

Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics — a framework for Indigenous data governance developed by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance.

Settle who decides before you settle which database. Developed in and for Indigenous data sovereignty contexts; cited here with credit, not adopted as ours.

Vendor lock-in

A dependency that makes leaving a supplier disproportionately costly.

You can check out any time you like. Getting your data out is the part to test before you need it.

Human in the loop

A design where a person reviews or approves before an automated output takes effect.

A named person looks before it goes out. It only counts if they have the time and the authority to say no.

Heirloom Intelligence

Our own organising synthesis: knowledge, systems and technologies deliberately preserved, activated and transmitted across generations.

We borrow the logic of seed-keeping — deciding which lines are worth saving and passing on — and apply it to knowledge and technology. It is our framing, not an inherited or ceremonial tradition.

Questions

Things people ask

Do I need to know anything about AI to start?
No. The workshops and guides assume you have never used these tools, and nothing on this site requires you to already speak the vocabulary. If a term is unfamiliar, it is in the glossary in plain language.
Is Heirloom Praxis only for Black and Afro-Indigenous people?
The work is built for and centred on Black, Afro-Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean communities — that focus shapes the examples, the trust, and the questions we think are worth asking. It is not a restriction on who may hire us or attend, and organisations serving these communities are a core part of the practice.
Are you telling people AI is good, or telling people to avoid it?
Neither. We tell you what it does, what it does not do, what it costs, and what you give up. Some of the most useful advice we give is that a particular problem is not an AI problem. Enthusiasm and refusal are both easier than judgement, and judgement is the service.
Do the tools on this site send my answers to an AI company?
It depends on the tool, and each one tells you before you start. Three of the seven never call a language model at all. Where a tool does, the request goes through our server — never from your browser — carries no identifying information, and is not retained by us after your result is returned.
Is the Heirloom Shield a certification?
No. It is a self-assessment for reflection and planning. It produces no pass, no fail, no badge and no compliance claim. A credible certification requires a certifying body independent of the people selling the implementation work — which we are not, so we do not certify.
How accurate is the Crop Planner?
It is a planning aid, not agronomic advice. It works from frost dates and documented days-to-maturity, and it does not know your soil, your microclimate, your water or your pests. Every plan it produces ends with the questions to take to your local extension office, and you should take them.
Come to a workshopUse the tools

Something missing? Tell us what you wanted to find and we will write it.