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 OpenChamber to integrate small and local LLM integration into development environments and web chats.

Discussion Resources & Links Adam's Projects & Research: BayLeaf AI Counterplatform: Hyper-local, open-source AI infrastructure built for UC Santa Cruz. See also the BayLeaf Getting Started Guide and BayLeaf Blog.

Adam Smith's UCSC Directory Page & Personal Website

Adam Smith on YouTube & GitHub (@rndmcnlly)

Open-Source Agent Harnesses & Wrappers: OpenCode – Open-source command-line coding agent harness with VS Code integration (comparable to Claude Code)

OpenChamber – Graphical desktop wrapper for OpenCode with VS Code support (comparable to Claude Cowork)

OpenWeb UI – Self-hosted web interface and desktop app for local and remote LLM models

OpenRouter – Token broker/middleman routing requests across competitive LLM inference providers

r/LocalLlama – Community subreddit for local LLMs, open weights, and hardware advice

AGENTS.md Convention & Agent Skills Standard – Open standards for persistent context management

Context Distillation Paper (arXiv)