I Spent weeks Fighting My Local AI Coding Agent — Here’s Everything I Learned
How I built a coding agent that runs entirely on my own hardware — no API, no cloud, no monthly bill — and the build steps that actually work. A while back I decided I wanted a coding agent I could leave running without paying for it. Not a toy, not a trial. Something that could work on a project, use tools, and not call home every time it typed. The recipe sounds simple: a capable model, a serving layer that translates its output correctly, and a frontend to talk to it. Getting there took a lot of trial and error — VRAM arithmetic, a serving stack that kept crashing, a Docker Desktop disk full of itself, and a few rules I had to write to keep a small model from looping on itself. The end result is a stack that works and is cheap to run. I’ll walk you through it, the way it actually happened.