Lab Notebook

The Lab Notebook is where the methodology lives. When I run a bake-off - pitting models against a real task with a real gold set and a real judge - the scorecard goes here, sanitized and reproducible, so the conclusions are inspectable rather than asserted.

Most of these orbit one thesis I keep testing rather than claiming: how much of my daily AI work actually needs to leave my machine? Frontier cloud models still win the hard, open-ended work. But a surprising amount of the repetitive, high-volume, privacy-sensitive work - reading mail, summarizing documents, tagging a life’s worth of data - may already run well enough locally. Each entry below is one test of that question.

The ledger entry format

Every bake-off entry carries a structured bakeoff block in its frontmatter so the ledger index can tabulate them:

bakeoff:
  task: "<one line - what the models were asked to do>"
  date: "YYYY-MM-DD"
  judge: "<the quality ceiling / grader>"
  contestants: ["<model A>", "<model B>", ...]
  winner: "<model>"
  axes: ["<metric>", ...]      # what we scored on
  verdict: "<one-line takeaway>"

The body carries the gold set, the per-axis results, the findings, and the operational caveats that matter. Personal data used in a test never appears here - only the method and the numbers.