2 posts tagged with "self-hosted"

The most expensive thing my agent can do is ask its smartest model a trivial question.

That sounds backwards – trivial questions are supposed to be cheap. A two-line summary, a yes/no judgement, a bit of text cleanup: milliseconds of honest work for a competent model. But Azek runs on one machine, and on one machine the flagship model's attention is the scarcest resource in the system. Every small job it handles personally gets paid for twice: once in the GPU it occupies, and once in a currency most people never see billed.

So Azek – the self-hosted agent from the first post – runs two models side by side, on purpose. The big one talks to me. The small one does everything else. This post is about the second lane: why it exists, what drives on it, and why the split turned out to be one of the best decisions in the whole project.

Last month my AI agent spent eight minutes turning one email into a calendar event. Five of those minutes were pure waste – the model fumbling with tool parameters, failing validation, retrying, fumbling again. I sat there watching tool_input_invalid errors scroll past, produced by software I own completely, running on hardware I paid for, doing a task any cloud assistant finishes before you've put the phone down.

I'd do it all again tomorrow. This post is about why – and it's the opening move of a series about what it actually takes. (Part 2 looks at why a second, simpler model runs beside the primary.)

Because the obvious question deserves a straight answer. It's 2026. Capable AI agents are a commodity: sign up, connect Gmail, press "allow," done. Why would anyone build one from scratch and insist it runs on a laptop?