Tag / The engineering notebook
Local-First AI
3 articles and notes on this topic.
Plan Once, Then Act: When the ReAct Loop Is the Wrong Harness for Small Local Models
On small local models, the standard ReAct loop has a failure mode nobody warns you about: the model calls one tool, declares victory, and stops. What we measured across 12 GGUF models in EdgeVox, why we added a plan-once dispatcher, and how to decide which loop your task actually needs.
Building EdgeVox: Chaining STT → Local LLM → TTS Without Touching the Cloud
A first-hand build narrative of EdgeVox, a fully offline voice agent that chains speech-to-text, a local LLM, and text-to-speech on one device. The architecture in plain language, ROS2 integration, the latency budget, and the failure modes nobody warns you about.
OpenClaw: Security is the Final Boss
OpenClaw, formerly Clawdbot, runs a personal AI agent locally and wires it straight into your messaging apps. Its gateway architecture, the security failures that followed, and what building a safe autonomous ecosystem would actually take.