About Small Pondering 

I build agents around local language models and think, slowly, about what they tell us about who we are and how we think. 

This is where I'll be writing about that thinking as well as about some prototypes I developed called LoCAL and LoCAL2 (Loosely-Coupled Agent Language Model), a multi-agent coordination architecture. The reason I call the current version LoCAL2 rather than throw away the first version, is to remind me not to forget why the first version did not perform well.  

All the agents exclusively communicate through a common medium based on a publish and subscribe (pubsub) mechanism. This reflects my early exposure to pubsub and subject-based addressing at a small startup called Teknekron Software Systems, (which eventually became TIBCO Software). I was enamored by the way software components could be put together into a greater whole by a common message 'bus'. 

When I started to think about whether scale is a prerequisite to intelligence, or can we have smaller, cheaper models do the same thing working together, I gravitated towards what I know. 

What you'll find here:

• Thought Process — I have insisted that LoCAL2 be explainable, show its reasoning process and be explicit about how it decided to use a tool and how it came to a conclusion. I try to do something similar here. The blog captures the unsure steps I take and the mistakes I've made to arrive at where I am now. 
• Discoveries — along the road, I discover, what to me, are interesting artifacts. Three of these little trinkets are:
• Stigmergy is how agents affect other agent behavior by changing the environment. With the right participants, this has proved to be so much more powerful than any if-then-else structure that I could come up with. 
• We also get agent self-reflection by inserting its own chain-of-thought and other agent comments into an agent's context window. This changes agent behavior in unexpected ways.
• We use a similar approach to create Personas where we create a number of 'seed' conversation summaries that lay the foundation for a certain approach to problem solving and give it a tool to pick the best persona to handle a situation. For example, the Creative persona include the use of 'contrapuntal' thinking. The word implies generating different lines of reasoning to create a harmonious synthesis, and can be useful to break out of linear thinking groove. 

I've been documenting pieces of this on Medium for a while. This blog is where it converges — a proper home for the project as it moves from "personal research system" toward something closer to a thesis defense.