What can a local model do for you in early May 2026?
Published: 2026-05-15
What can a local model do for you in early May 2026?
#dart<br>#ollama<br>#llama.cpp
Introduction
I included the current month in the title of this article because we truely live in interesting times and the rate of progress in the LLM space including the open weights models that you can run locally on "consumer" hardware is truely phenomenal! The fact that I write this when May 1 aka International Workers' Day was only a few days ago is also not lost on me.
In this article, somewhat like a field report, I would like to show currently what is possible in the area of agentic software development with Dart using reasonable sized local models paired with a good agent harness (which can be just as important as the model).
The cast
So lets get down to specifics: what exactly have I been using? On the software side I have used:
Model: Qwen 3.6 35B 4bit quant
Context size: 132k
Inference engine: Ollama
Agent: pi-agent
OS: Fedora 43
On the hardware side I am fortunate to have a Framework AMD strix halo 128GB so I could easily run both the model and agent all on the same machine.
The show
The task I decided to give my agent+model combo was to migrate my website from the long in the tooth DSG to picosite.<br>While both are Dart based static site generators, DSG is a project I had taken on the maintaining after its original author stopped and did so for some years but had decided to stop maintaining about 3 years ago (though I did do a little update to it late last year). Meanwhile picosite is a new SSG I have written from scratch starting in mid 2024, with the initial purpose of writing the user manual for the picoTracker project.
Now the reason I chose this particular task is that it should be one that LLMs excel at, coverting from an existing form to a new one and it was also one that I knew would involve hours if not days of drudge work for me as while both SSGs are Dart based, I built picosite without any intention of keeping backwards compatibility so while they shared some similarities there was enough difference between them to require alot of work to migrate and I also knew that picosite didn't yet have some of the more advanced features of DSG that my website content made use of.
But not content (sic) with just a straight migration, I decided that once that was done I also wanted a new design for the website, so added that to the work the minion (my current preferred term for agentic LLMs) would need to do.
Finally while I have been very happy with my existing publishing setup of keeping the content in a Github repo and having the SSG run on Netlify to generate and then host the website, I wanted to improve my workflow slightly by being able to preview the site so I added yet one more task of creating a GH Action workflow to publish the content via GH Pages as well.
The process
To carry out the work I used my now preferred workflow on requesting that the agent first create a markdown document with a detailed implementation plan. This plan covered all the pages, templates, and configuration files that needed to be migrated, along with the new design requirements but not the github actions workflow for publishing via GH Pages, I added that later as an adhoc task.
The agent got to work and the plan itself was surprisingly solid, covering most of the cases I has in mind. There were a few minor refinements along the way where I had to point out something that the agent had missed - mostly around some of the more unusual features of my existing site that didn't have obvious equivalents in picosite yet, but nothing major. The agent was able to incorporate these refinements into the plan and the overall process felt very much like giving guidance while working with a knowledgeable colleague, just one who in this case just happens to be powered by a local LLM and so sometimes takes a while before they start to reply.
The result
The result was excellent - the migration was a complete success. All of my blog posts, the new design, and the new GH Actions workflow all came out workign nicely. The only minor hiccup was the poor choice by the LLM of initially using a third party GH action but that was fixed easily. The agent handled the tweaks required to go from DSG's templates to picosite's templating system, migrated all the markdown content along with fixing up missing or incorrect frontmatter that I had not even noticed previously and even managed to get the new design looking good after a few attempts which was more about my lack of clarity on what I wanted for the design rather than anything else.
I was particularly impressed by how well the agent handled the less obvious parts of the migration - things like the custom data sources and the way DSG handled folder listings. While picosite didn't have direct equivalents for all of these at the time, the agent was able to work around the differences, add the missing functionality...