I wanted to share with you all my experience on coding with local AI, on a self-hosted oss.

(the entire post has been fully written by me without any AI)

Check the linked blog post.

Also, to be clear, the post itself has no ads and no monetization whatsoever. This is not self promotion for any scope than to share my experience on a controversial topic.

(this has been posted on a couple of self-host communities, but i thought it could be of interest here as well)

Adding here for this community: my setup is a Ryzen 9 5950X with 64gb DDR4 and two NVIDIA RTX A4000 (32gb VRAM total), running Qwen 3.8 27b UD_Q5_K, with 200k context (q8) on llama.cpp.

  • akavel@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    Very interesting article, thank you.

    From my experiences with paid models at work, tests were especially insidious: I had cases where a seemingly sensible test showed up to not work at all. I was planning to push it but I got curious, and decided to “break” the feature it said it was pretending to verify. Lo and behold, test stays green. I find it especially bad because nobody loves to write tests, even less to review them, it’s not easy to make them good, LLM oh so loves to churn them out, and I’m already tired reviewing the main part of the code.

    As for docs, my personal take is that they may not be as good as you think. IMO it’s more that we are not taught to write good docs or even to properly care about them. So I claim it’s the same JS case here, just you have even less skill to evaluate it than you had with JS. Note, it’s not directed at you personally more than anyone else, and I may certainly be wrong, that’s just how I feel about the majority of the industry in the area of docs (even pre-AI to a big degree).

    Your article spelled out some things in a nice new way for me, with an interesting new takeaway for me in context of what I want to learn (here I must especially be wary of “AI” as it can help somewhat but can also actively degrade/hinder/derail/anchor), vs. where I don’t - but then if I don’t do I have skills to evaluate its result and to what degree (e.g. on your example, IMO, c++ high, js medium, docs low). Thank you again!

    • afterate@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      Not scientific, but I sometimes get Gemma4 check Qwen 3.8’s work because I noticed when a model knows its not their work, they’re a lot more critical. Might be helpful to get another model to review tests.

    • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euOP
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      23 hours ago

      Yes, carefully check AI output is a must, always.

      But still tests even if not perfect are better than no tests, so…