Building Local Agents: Keep Deterministic Logic Outside the Model
HotEstablishment7184 · reddit · 2026-08-19
The author shares insights on building a local AI assistant named "Christine" with a focus on architecture over raw model power:
- Architecture: Deterministic logic (schedules, state, device facts) should live outside the model in durable, queryable storage, rather than relying on the context window as memory.
- System Design: Agent consistency comes from routing, bounded tools, and abstraction layers, not just the base model's capabilities.
- Voice Pipeline: Uses Whisper.cpp for ASR and Windows TTS. The bottleneck is currently STT (2.8s-4.4s), while generation and output are faster (2.2s total).
- Knowledge: Built on curated domain knowledge for specialization rather than generic retrieval, utilizing cross-domain abstraction to connect patterns in real-time.
The goal is a practical, bounded local system that fails honestly and improves, rather than a theatrical AGI demo.
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