My Foray into Local LLMs

A Whole New World Lately I've been using agents and SOTA models for all of my software development work. It wasn't easy for me to give up writing code by hand. But in early May, while working on a new Kubernetes operator for QuestDB Enterprise, everything about agentic coding just seemed to click. I was running multiple concurrent sandboxed sessions in tmux, each with their own set of subagents churning away at a greenfield codebase. And after around a week, I had a working product with multiple layers of tests (unit, integration, and live cloud e2e) across multiple k8s versions and cloud providers. Was the code perfect? Not even close. But I was able to accomplish something in a mere week that would've taken me months in the pre-AI days. I knew then that writing code by hand would soon be a thing of the past. And my old code wasn't perfect anyway. Using AI exclusively for coding does stoke one of my existential fears as a software developer: having complete and utter dependence on…