alt Hacker News> That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for.
Really? I'm a total amateur when it comes to doing anything with local models but I tried a few in this range using ollama at this point, and they didn't seem to know much about anything, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to search the web or run other tools, so that was where the experiment ended.
A small local model that can use bash would be a bit of a game-changer for me.
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Gemini CLI can use bash and run on the Gemma local model.
Local models are improving quickly so if you keep an eye open you’ll find something soon enough. But from experience, I’ll warn you that local models can lose the plot very quickly. Their little self arguments when they get stuck usually come down to:
- It failed? This must be a mistake, I’ll try it again. It failed? This must be a mistake, I’ll try it again because then I will complete the task (repeat about every six seconds until you rescue it).
- You know, the best way to deal with a permissions problem is to erase the entire system. That’ll definitely solve those pesky permissions and I’ll complete the task.
The latest small models are now reliable enough at simple tools like web search I think. It's just afaik none of the user friendly harnesses like ollama or LMStudio have a real one-click setup flow for this. You'll need to download models and do a fair bit of tool configuration.