An experimental Generative AI service for the UC Santa Cruz campus community, operated by Adam Smith (Dept. of Computational Media).

BayLeaf has undergone a security review by UC Santa Cruz ITS: the campus Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and his team deemed it ready to launch, safe for use by the UCSC campus community. This attests to its security posture and is not an adoption of BayLeaf as an ITS-operated or ITS-supported service; it remains faculty-operated. See SECURITY.md and politics/SECURITY.md.

An Open WebUI deployment offering curated AI models to UCSC students, faculty, and staff. Features include:

• A Basic model backed by a rotating open-weight LLM, customized with a campus-aware system prompt. All Chat agents are backed by open-weight, sub-trillion-parameter models.
• Invite-code-gated groups for course-, department-, or role-specific models and toolkits
• Web Search and Web Page Content tools available to all users
• Per-turn rate limiting for fair, cost-efficient access

An OpenRouter-proxying API that gives the campus community programmatic access to LLMs, web search and page fetching, and sandboxed code execution:

• Keyless access from the campus network (169.233.x.x)
• API key access for off-campus use (self-issued via the service)
• Web search & fetch — search the web and extract clean page content from one or many URLs at a time, both backed by Tavily, available to all authenticated users
• Code sandbox — persistent Linux environments (backed by Daytona) for running code, uploading/downloading files, all authenticated with the same API key; campus-pass users get ephemeral one-shot sandboxes
• Injects a light system prompt prefix to orient downstream agents
• Recommends an open-weight model as the default, while allowing optional access to proprietary models for tasks that warrant them

Public uptime dashboard for all BayLeaf services.

Questions, problems, or feature requests? Open an issue on this repo.

This is a small, faculty-operated project. Response times are best-effort, but every issue is read.

All LLM inference routes through zero-data-retention (ZDR) providers via OpenRouter. No message content is logged or stored by any third-party LLM provider. Non-AI features that require persistent storage (e.g. the Daytona-backed Code Sandbox) store user files by necessity.

BayLeaf has speculatively integrated institutional inference back-ends for which UC holds in-place data-protection agreements: Google Cloud / Vertex AI (serving the Gemini family) and AWS Bedrock. These demonstrate a clear path toward a UCSC ITS-managed BayLeaf with both technical and legal data protection. Two caveats: the project runs from a personal admin account rather than one managed by UCSC ITS, so those agreements do not currently cover BayLeaf traffic; and the Vertex AI back-end is integrated but disabled pending removal of abuse-monitoring data retention from our accounts, because BayLeaf requires ZDR for every active provider. See politics/FERPA.md for the full analysis.

• api/ — BayLeaf API Cloudflare Worker (api.bayleaf.dev)
• docs/ — Static GitHub Pages site published at bayleaf.dev
• chat/ — BayLeaf Chat DigitalOcean App (chat.bayleaf.dev): workspace models, custom tools, filters, and design doc
• politics/ — The case for universities owning their own AI infrastructure (manifesto)

This repo is publicly visible. It never contains API keys, credentials, or other sensitive configuration.

Nearly 100% of the code, documentation, and other project data in this repository was created using generative AI in agentic coding tools. This is an intentional choice: it demonstrates that sufficient technical capacity exists within the university to build and operate a service like this, without ceding control or responsibility to external parties. Critics, allies, and other humans seeking a direct human connection should contact Adam Smith directly.

Adam Smith · UCSC Directory