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.
I made a DOS port of Tetris Attack for the first IBM PC. The audio hardware is a single buzzer. I created the engine for music and sound effects, by hand, from scratch… at 4.77 MHz. I had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t. The parts which aren’t that-sounds-right repetition are just turning column heights into notes.
Is that music? That slapdash bespoke effort, in the dire absence of any formal training, on toy hardware? Because if my bullshit counts then I’m not clear how any danceable formulaic realization of proper western music theory would not count… and if my bullshit doesn’t count then I’m not sure what the point is in puffing up human effort over perfectly fine artificial results.
No. lol! It’s not music. It’s computerized sounds. Did you write the music?? Score the different instruments? Wat it your original composition?
Creating music is a SKILL. A talent that someone sharpened over years of repetition, learning, practice, and love. So, no…. You didn’t make music. You programmed a computer to make sounds that OTHER people created.
I am the only human being responsible for the audio in that game. There are no other people, fool. Every beat and trill is me using the buzzer as an instrument. If using randomness to fill in some variety is disqualifying, you’re picking a fight with the entire medium of process music. Nobody wrote out each performance of “In C” beforehand, so it’s only Terry Riley and friends noodling around, yeah?
Do you think Bobby Prince wasn’t a musician, just because he worked in MIDI? He didn’t play an actual harpsichord on “Into Sandy’s City,” so nuh uh, doesn’t count. The computer did it! For some reason! Guess it was feeling spooky that morning.
Or do you simply think bad music is not music? No true Scotsman can make music unless they have skill! Straight up gatekeeping amateur effort. Can amateurs then play music? Does someone fumbling their way through a solo comprise some different process? Because if that’s where your philosophy lands, there’s a hilarious counterexample in James Hetfield working out “Master Of Puppets.”
You’re not a musician. Stop arguing.
I wrote music my-fucking-self in a sound engine I wrote my-fucking-self. Zero AI was involved, you illiterate troll. I built my own goddamn instrument to give my game a soundtrack, within some obscene technical constraints. Fuck your blinding prejudice against anything besides how you were taught.
LMAO… hack.
Geez, you should lay off being a prat for a while, Mr. AI.
I can pick up a synthesizer which does nothing but produce prerecorded sounds and hit random things till it sounds good. If someone enjoys it they would call it music.
Slop generated music ain’t any different. Music and art as a whole is in the eye of the behold. Only a raging asshole tries to tell people what is or isn’t art to them.
It doesn’t have to be art to you. But no one else gives a fuck what you or I or anyone else thinks. Because only their own opinion matters when it comes to what they believe is art.
LMAO… the keyboard/synthesiser bullshit? Really?
No dude. Richard Wright of Pink Floyd was a classically trained pianist. He did not “hit random things till it sounded good”.
Ffs! What a fucking parhrtic argument!
No one hits random shit until it sounds good. That’s called noise. You clearly know absolutely nothing about music. Seriously…. Just go sit down.
Gooseworx hit random shit until it sounded good. She’s famously self-taught. Her soundtrack for The Amazing Digital Circus is fantastic.
What do you think classical training is, besides an effort to explain and share which noises sound good, in a particular context? You’d tell us the first humans to bang rocks together to form a beat weren’t really making music, because those cavemen hadn’t invented the art degree.
I’m not arguing this with you. AI is not music and those that use it are not musicians. You’re a hack
Wildest goal post changing today lol
We’re not talking about AI here. Gooseworx is a real human person, who wrote the music for her viral hit show using a normal meatspace electronic keyboard. Or does composition not count unless the keys are made of dead elephant bones?
You don’t know what an argument is. You’re just spitting at people and cruising for a moderator’s boot up the ass.
I don’t debate whatabout bullshit. Blocked.
‘Nobody makes music that way!’ Gooseworx makes music that way. ‘Who asked?! Blocked!’
Well, I tried. Good riddance.
Music you know well was made from a preset sample. The new akais break copyrighted music into separate stems using generative AI. Illegal by pink pantheress has like a billion plays. That’s like three notes and it DOES sound like she just pressed a few. Listen to it. I’m not a musician but I’m married to one and know a lot. None of them are trained.
LMAO… You have no fucking idea how keyboards and synths used to work, do you?
Lean shit. Them come back to this and delete your embarrassing shit.