Reflections on building cloud and local hybrid machine entities

Talk with Colin Hanna at Local First Conf.

Transcript

1. EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026 Earendil was created to craft software and open protocols that strengthen human agency
2. We are a band of humans dedicated to crafting better ways to wield AI EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
3. ...by building tools in the open designed to be shaped by the humans who use them EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
4. The frontier AI stack [pre training capacity; models; RL data; harnesses; applications] is rapidly converging toward a few walled platforms. THE PROBLEM EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
5. Those same platforms are actively encouraging humans and builders to forego their agency and let the agents "do the full job". THE OTHER PROBLEM EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
6. An open source frontier AI stack that is neutral, freely composable, and maximally controlled by the end user THE SOLUTION EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
7. Gondolin APPLICATION HARNESS GATEWAY MODEL SANDBOX, EXECUTION, INFRA Absurd Mailhook Lefos Pi Coding Agent 3rd party Pi Absurd Radius Open-weight Local or cloud? EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
8. Harness Entity* *an “entity” is an agent. We believe we are the agents! These architectures are already hybrid. The harness often runs locally, while the entity leverages global state Local Cloud EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
9. People want to interact with entities that bring the benefits of local-first, such as context and session ownership, customizability, and privacy EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
10. …but they want that entity to feel coherent and capable across interfaces, and to be able to manage access to relevant context and data stores globally. EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
11. Ç Local Cloud Ç Ç Ç Residential IP Pro Con Cloud IP Cheaper Compute Availability Availability Context ownership Third party interfaces Data ownership & access EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026 Multiplayer Security Privacy
12. Navigating these trade offs in a principled way, without compromising trustworthiness, is non trivial EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
13. There are many agent harnesses, but this one is yours /PI EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026 pi.dev
14. Agentic Loops are a weird form of state synchronization EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
15. GPU State + Agent Local State + Persistent State KV Caches Model Changes File System EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
16. A session / session transcript is an append-only log EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
17. The append-only log becomes GPU State + Agent State EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
18. I can take a session transcript and take it to a different machine EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
19. I should be able to take a session log and bring it to a different model EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
20. Session log turned into model specific API calls EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
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23. They increasingly don't like the power of these APIs. • Hidden server side tokens (web search results are not revealed) • Hidden reasoning (to fight distilling) • Some API encourage server side session logs (store = true) • Assistant Prefill blocked (for safety) • Some session logs are retained (cybersecurity risks) EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
24. Others increasingly fight agents. • #vibecoding on lobsters and other luddite communities • Agentic engineering puts pressure on Open Source • Fight of Cloud IPs vs Residential Proxies • Misaligned Incentives for Agent Authentication EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
25. How can we break free from the behemoths? EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
26. We can start with Open Harnesses, continue by retaining your Data, and ultimately support Open+Local Models EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
27. But the experience has to be user friendly. It cannot be worse than ChatGPT, Codex and Claude Code EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
28. Run the harness where you want Connect it to the World EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
29. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/11/22/llm-apis/ EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026
30. /END earendil.com/purpose EARENDIL INC. JUL 2026