Essays on AI agents, ACT-R memory, self-hosting, and scoring models — from a workshop that runs local. https://i-am-jacob.com/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z Jakehttps://i-am-jacob.com/about/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/act-r-then-vs-now/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z

Five months of production lessons on an AI memory system: the collapse bug health checks missed, running ACT-R and mem0 in parallel, and a custom context-injection plugin.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/act-r-then-vs-now/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/agents-build-overnight/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z

Running agent builds unattended for hours: checkbox plans, fresh context per step, revert-on-failure discipline, and why ten behavioral laws beat a 400-step instruction guide.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/agents-build-overnight/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/clean-room-testing/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z

Clean-room testing for AI-built software: tests written after and independently of the code, blindness enforced with file permissions, and searcher/evaluator roles split between agents.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/clean-room-testing/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/design-by-committee/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z

Running design reviews as multi-agent conference rooms: locked contracts, continuous polling, and how a panel of AIs catches in minute four what would cost a weekend later.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/design-by-committee/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/fish-bite-scoring/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z

Building a fishing forecast engine that argues with itself: weighted averages that flattered, dominant factors that needed veto power, and a catch log that overruled the model twice.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/fish-bite-scoring/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/lucky-fools/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z

An evolutionary optimizer kept crowning strategies that practiced great and played the real game worse. The fix wasn't smarter math — it was demanding rematches.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/lucky-fools/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/secondary-agent-economics/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z

How this workshop runs ~8 billion tokens of agent work a month for under $60: a mid-tier primary model, an idle subscription's second life, and free preview tiers as burst capacity.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/secondary-agent-economics/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/self-hosted-guides/ 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z 2026-08-24T12:00:00Z

Practical self-hosting guides from a workshop that runs its own stack 24/7: service skeletons, systemd discipline, watchdogs, and snapshot policy.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/self-hosted-guides/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/aegis-falls-architecture/ 2026-03-25T12:00:00Z 2026-03-25T12:00:00Z

The complete cascade: frontier reasoning falling through orchestration into local execution, unified by cognitive memory.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/aegis-falls-architecture/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/lily-ai-act-r-memory/ 2026-03-22T12:00:00Z 2026-03-22T12:00:00Z

How a production AI memory layer works: ACT-R chunks, activation dynamics, decay, and context-shaped retrieval.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/lily-ai-act-r-memory/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/act-r-cognitive-architecture/ 2026-03-10T12:00:00Z 2026-03-10T12:00:00Z

Adapting a human cognitive architecture for autonomous agents: activation-based retrieval, spreading activation, procedural utility.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/act-r-cognitive-architecture/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/self-improving-agents/ 2026-03-05T12:00:00Z 2026-03-05T12:00:00Z

Six iterations of an agent platform and what each taught about building infrastructure around models instead of smarter prompts.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/self-improving-agents/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/why-local-ai/ 2026-02-20T12:00:00Z 2026-02-20T12:00:00Z

A manifesto on running AI locally: owning your inference stack, the structural risks of API dependence, and why local-first wins.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/why-local-ai/ https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/homelab-architecture/ 2026-02-10T12:00:00Z 2026-02-10T12:00:00Z

Every infrastructure decision traced to the problem that demanded it: virtualization strategy, GPU passthrough, storage tiers, remote access.

Read at https://i-am-jacob.com/writing/homelab-architecture/