535: The You in the Machine
Adam Smith from UC Santa Cruz joins us to discuss local Small Language Models (SLMs) and building open, autonomous tools. We explore his BayLeaf AI counterplatform, transagency (the "me-and-the-car" concept of human-agent collaboration), context distillation, and running models locally without relying on data-harvesting corporate clouds.
Adam also shares practical strategies for working with coding agents, including why plain-text AGENTS.md files outperform model weight fine-tuning for long-term knowledge retention. He also describes how he uses open-source tools like OpenWebUI, OpenCode and…
The skinny
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