Local models are meaningfully useful* for agentic work now. This is a realization I came to over the last day or so.
I wrote a lot of custom mods for a game that recently switched engines. The migration is going rather smooth for most people because of wise architectural choices from the dev early on, and because they prioritized backwards compatibility in the update. But there are still some rough edges, especially if you had your hooks deep into the engine.
I recently vibeforked Unbiased Bob’s fork of Strata to make it compatible, easy to use and optimized for my OS and hardware (NixOS 5800x3d 64gb, 7900xtx 24gb). Sol 6.1 got it working with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next IQ3 XSS (~75GB) at roughly 46tps 164k ctx with enough headroom to launch a heavy browser along with a triple-A game set to low in 720p for testing when I need to (plus space for zram swap)
I set it up in deepseek harness, gave it a 14MB error log in the game’s working directory, then went to sleep. I woke up and it had run for 3 hours. The game launched with only two errors, which it quickly fixed from the new, vastly smaller logfile.
It hammered down every issue, making changes across 30 separate mod repos. Practically a one-shot, and all the features worked as originally intended.
I left a local coding agent running completely on its own for three hours across multiple repos across a dozen auto-compactions with a log file and no ability for it to verify its work besides a compiler. And it produced meaningful results. I can’t speak to the code quality, but it worked. This was completely unthinkable even just two years ago. Even one year ago, the cloud frontier wouldn’t be able to do this on its own, and now a local model can, running on my consumer gaming hardware from one or two gens back.
“Huh… So… We’re here now…" I said to myself, with a bit of stunned disbelief, wondering what the future one or two years from now might hold.
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Yeah, we’re here. I’m a professional programmer but I haven’t written an actual line of code in quite a while now, and I’ve been having so much fun with my local model (Qwen3.8-27B Q4) doing all sorts of cleanup tasks on my lifetime’s giant pile of accumulated files. For example, all my generated music - I ended up having Qwen build a GUI music manager and whipped up a website generator for my favourites so I can more easily share them through free hosts without having to hand them over to spotify or whatever.
I’m curious, is the game you mentioned modding Rimworld? I’ve been pondering modding it for some time now, it’s one of my favourite games, if you’ve got experience using AI for that I wouldn’t mind some pointers. It was always a “I know how to do this stuff but it takes way more time and attention than I’ve got available right now” sort of task but AI can help so much there. :) Your description of the “engine changed but compatibility is remarkably good” matches what I’ve seen of Rimworld’s recent 1.7 update.
I had a similar experience this week. I tried ollama like last year and thought it was kinda cool but ultimately not that helpful.
Over the weekend I got Qwen3.6 35b running Hermes on my gaming PC and it made me a whole back testing application for trading. Everything from planning out the work, breaking it into tasks, spinning up agents for blocks of work, writing tests, the whole shebang.
It took like two work days of me prodding it once in awhile but it’s still impressive
Does Qwen still do all the lengthy reasoning steps? Last time I tried to vibe-code some moderately easy webapp, it went through something like 1 - 1.5 million tokens. Which should be about 9h with your 46t/s?
I’ve been following r/decomps recently. Several times a day someone posts a new AI-generated decompile, seemingly by AI agents sent off on a mission without any guidance, effort, or proper setup. I expected the tools / harnesses to develop first before seeing results like this. It’s insane that models have these abilities while still being based on what is fundamentally just text generation.
How did you configure DeepSeek harness? I’m guessing a flake would be useful.
I read your post and ended up finding this repo: https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix
I’m considering deploying it for testing in a nix container. 🤔
I built my custom solution with a shared systemd qemu VM service to run harnesses isolated from my host that mount specific directories and run via wrappers that start and automatically SSH into them, as well as native variants that run on the host machine. (Plus args for quick selection and feature toggling e.g. “cx sol high memory” as well as per-harness hooks for my agnostic skill-like text injection system, memory tools, optimized system prompts, etc)
All of this is done in my nix flake (but can’t share here)
For Deepseek itself, I’m just using Moraxyc/deepseek-harness.nix for the package, and using its webui, with wrappers to integrate it with my vm/native dichotomy system.
I haven’t done any deep tooling integration or prompt rewriting with dsh like I have with codex and claude code. It’s still pretty early days for me using it and I prefer terminal apps in a multiplexer like herdr. But it doesn’t seem to need it so much either: sonnet eating 35k tokens for a “hello” out of the box was egregious to me, but dsh seems to be more light so I haven’t felt the need, and I don’t do as much with it and haven’t used it for very long yet so I haven’t felt the need to customize it as much as I have the other harnesses… Which is a bit ironic given that its customization and flexibility are pretty much its main selling points.
