I'm Dax — an independent AI researcher in Zwevegem, Belgium. I define architectures, constraints, and the philosophy a system should obey; then I delegate execution to the right model in the right context. "Architecte non-codeur" is not a euphemism and not modesty: I have never written a line of TypeScript, and the systems below total tens of thousands of them. It's an experimental condition. If the architecture is only expressible in code, a non-coder directing agents is the cleanest way to find out whether the ideas — not the typing — were the scarce part.
The entire infrastructure runs from a 14-liter ITX case in my living room. One GPU, one apartment, no cloud dependency I didn't choose deliberately.
Architecture forensics: behavioral fingerprinting, calibration analysis, think-block texture — telling apart what a model is from what its card claims. Essays on epistemic honesty: why "I don't know" is data, how benchmarks reward confident nonsense, what falsifiability looks like applied to LLMs. Published at blog.daxzeit.eu.
Pipeline-MoE: a multi-agent orchestrator where each seat — planner, builder, auditor, tester, scribe — runs the model its cognitive profile deserves, frontier and local side by side in one shared room. Built in 72 hours, then it started building itself: 180+ commits, 1,000+ tests, zero lines of human-written code. Documented live in a blog series where every claim is a transcript.
The RA series on HuggingFace: quantizations of dense reasoning distills, tuned and verified for agentic work on 24 GB consumer hardware — because a 27B that runs at your desk beats a 70B you have to rent, and the gap between the two pipelines is measurable.
The through-line, in four dates — each one documented when it happened, not reconstructed after:
A 29€ VPS, a WireGuard mesh out of the CGNAT "LAN prison", and the discovery that a local agent that can use a terminal can use tmux — and therefore can drive Claude Code like a human does. One Sunday, tools that are thirty years old.
The manifesto: SSH, tmux, and markdown replace orchestration frameworks. Against closed loops à la n8n; for agent agency over wired graphs. The framework is a markdown file.
The thesis becomes a system: specialized dense models chained in series, routing external at the task level. Pointed at its own codebase, it starts shipping its own features. It hasn't stopped.
Review norms become declarative gates; a near-miss becomes a law its agents inherit at birth. Still no orchestrator, no supervisor, no graph. What gets built on Unix primitives are not loops — they are norms.
Everything below runs local, from the same small case:
Popperian falsifiability, applied to systems and to my own thinking. If a claim can't be tested, it's not a claim. If a model can't say "I don't know," it's not honest. If an article I publish can't point at a transcript, a commit, or a session file, it doesn't get published.
The local stack isn't privacy as ideology — it's controlling the variables that matter. Local inference makes behavior reproducible; local memory makes the identity scaffold mine to shape; local search keeps my queries out of someone else's training set. The rest — mail, video, backups — stays where it works best. Frontier models get hired, per seat, for the decisions that deserve them. Pragmatism beats purism.