Agent-Based AI

🔍 Summary: Building the Engine of Understanding

This is not a finished story. It’s the beginning of one and likely the most ambitious post we’ve written yet.

We’re venturing into new ground: designing epistemic engines modular, evolving AI systems that don’t just respond to prompts, but build understanding, accumulate beliefs, and refine themselves through In-Context Learning.

In this series, we’ll construct a self-contained system separate from our core framework Stephanie that runs its own pipelines, evaluates its own beliefs, and continuously improves through repeated encounters with new data. Its core memory will be made of cartridges: scored, structured markdown artifacts distilled from documents, papers, and the web. These cartridges form a kind of belief substrate that guides the system’s judgments.

🧪 Summary

As AI developers, we often face the tradeoff between intelligence and accessibility. Powerful language models like Qwen3 run beautifully on servers but what about on the edge? On devices like Raspberry Pi or old Android phones, we’re limited to small models. The question we asked was simple:

Can we teach a small model to behave like a large one without retraining it from scratch using only its outputs and embeddings?