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17-18 September | Amsterdam, Netherlands
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Keynote: MCP Made Local Models Viable - Rachel-Lee Nabors, Developer Experience, Arize
Friday September 18, 2026 15:25 - 15:35 CEST
Auditorium (Ground Level)
By building agentic workflows that brick the moment they lose connectivity, we've circled back to the 1980s: the dumb terminal, the mainframe in someone else's building, intelligence rented by the minute. The first capable models were enormous, so we metered them by the token and shipped our context off-device. Tool bloat forced us to engineer economical harnesses: 50 tools can burn ~70k tokens, and selection quality collapses past a few dozen options. So we built progressive tool discovery, the wrapper pattern, retrieval, and routers that load only the tools a task needs. We engineered the problem down to something consumable by SAGE (Small And Good-Enough) models. On-device, free, private, these smaller models are increasingly capable of running agentic workflows and calling tools.

This talk covers the progress SLMs are making, efforts like DS4, and MCP client and server patterns built for the rise of local model adoption.
Speakers
avatar for Rachel-Lee Nabors

Rachel-Lee Nabors

Developer Experience, Arize
Rachel-Lee Nabors spent the better part of their career on web standards and opensource and has spearheaded developer education at FAANG and startups, on the React Team as well as W3C. Now they work to usher in the Agentic Web with companies like Arcade.dev
Friday September 18, 2026 15:25 - 15:35 CEST
Auditorium (Ground Level)
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