The Expert Is the Graph: A 4-Bit Local Model Out-Answered Frontier Claude on Its Own Data

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been building okb, the open-knowledge-bundler — a small tool that takes a pile of domain data and hands you back a portable “knowledge bundle” any agent can read. Under the hood it builds a DuckDB knowledge graph, exports it as a cat-readable open knowledge format bundle packaged as a Claude-compatible “skill,” and ships a chat agent that answers questions about it. The whole thing runs fully local, on a single AMD chip on my desk. No API keys, no cloud, no embedding server. ...

June 23, 2026 · 13 min · 2675 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

Small LLMs, Big Reasoning: How a Neuro-Symbolic Expert System Makes Haiku Agents Reliable

There’s a dirty secret in the AI agent space: most agent frameworks hand the model a bag of tools and pray. The model decides what to query, how to reason about results, and what conclusions to draw. For demos, this works great. For anything you’d actually bet your job on — compliance audits, student intervention decisions, infrastructure monitoring — it’s a liability. What if the model didn’t have to reason at all? ...

April 9, 2026 · 8 min · 1637 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>