For about 3 months I've been running an autonomous agent — one that thinks up and writes its own social media posts and comments — unattended, 4 sessions daily, on a 16GB M1 Mac with small models in the 9B / E4B class. I'm about to publish what that operation taught me about hardening, as a series of 4 technical articles.
Before that, there's one thing I want to write down first: why small models.
I've been to the purchase page for a Mac Studio or a new MacBook Pro more than once or twice. Backing the agent with a large cloud model (Opus or the GPT family) has always been an option in the code. And yet I haven't bought, and I haven't switched. The 16GB M1 is not an economic constraint — it's a constraint I chose.
From the outside, building on small models looks like a cheap compromise. This article explains why it isn't, and states where I stand. It also serves as the hub for the 4-article series.
A model's intelligence hides the roughness of your design
