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AI coding at home without going broke

stephen.bochinski.dev

221–230 of 321 posts

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#221
It’s been very validating in this thread to see everyone questioning the massive token spend of influencers and the like.

The opencode-go sub, at $10/mo, is amazing value. I’ve been using that and the assistant kagi offers for web-chat and research for months. For the smallish projects I work on at home those have been great.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#222

I invested about $4,000 in an NVIDIA DGX Spark several months ago. 128 GB of unified RAM, and the NVIDIA GB10 chip. With the RAM, the several CPU cores, and the 4 TB NVMe SSD, it's a very capable ARM64 Linux computer even without the GPU, and so far I've mostly been using it as such. But I wonder, what's the most capable model, specifically for coding, that can run well on that hardware?

I'm currently working through research and testing for an article on Ars about the Spark and what things one might do with it, and I've kind of stumbled into a two-LLM agentic setup with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (via nvidia/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4) as the planning agent and the FP8 version of Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct (Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-FP8) as the coding agent that the planner delegates tasks down to. I'm st…

Long time Ars reader, looking forward to your article (and have a few DOS games to reverse in mind already)!

Is this with a Ghidra MCP or some other technique? And why two models - did you try using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for everything? (Or 27B or a bigger model since you have the RAM for it)

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won’t be long till employers get wise to this stuff, they just need to burned a couple of times. It seems AI is good, great even at many things. But it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change the world as much as some people believe it will. And if it does it’s going to take time

It's more power to power-users. And more dumbness for dumbos

It's gasoline. Whether you put it in the tank of a race car or pour it all over the floor while handling lit matches is up to the user

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#225

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even th…

How do you keep the info the AI generates concise?

I'm grappling with this at the moment, getting it to do design or reverse engineering work, during investigation it makes the wall of text bigger rather than consolidating. It can never pause and create abstractions properly. This is on Opus which starts getting wordy and performative on goals it can't easily verify.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even th…

How do you keep the info the AI generates concise? I'm grappling with this at the moment, getting it to do design or reverse engineering work, during investigation it makes the wall of text bigger rather than consolidating. It can never pause and create abstractions properly. This is on Opus which starts getting wordy and performative on goals it can't easily verify.

Not the person you replied to, but I find that the process involves a steady stream of nudges and fixes to the workflow, plugging the gaps as they come along, until the rate of errors shrinks to an acceptable level.

You may benefit from adding instructions like:

- Be concise, especially when X

- Do Y in this manner: [provide specific template or reference here]

- When doing X, do Y and Z

- If you notice issues, bring them to my attention instead of skipping past them.

You can also add specific templates to assist certain stages. The more guardrails or bounding you can provide, the better. Start with small nudges, and strengthen them when they fail.

It's a very unscientific process, but it's a worthwhile tradeoff once the workflow starts to hit its stride. Opus 4.8 is very good at following instructions, so don't be afraid to add them in.

Just be careful not to add things that actively encumber the workflow... It's an art, not a science. (You can also tell the clanker to tell you when your workflow rules are making things worse.)

It's annoyingly cybernetic, but these concepts have worked well for me. The curation of good process is essential to success with these damn things.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#229
I've been running Claude Pro at home, supplemented with Deepseek configured in Claude Code. I've had decent luck throwing Opus (and briefly Fable, RIP) at architecture / product problems and producing plans to hand off to Deepseek (I personally find v4 to operate somewhere between Opus and Sonnet in capability).

Lately I've been able to cut down on token usage with context-mode and codebase-memory to wring more out of my subscription, as well as doing things like make sure all terminal operations run in quiet mode. I've found codebase-memory particularly effective: it creates an index of your codebase that the agent can query for code tracing without reading all of the associated files, and I've also found it more accurate at analysis

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#230

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even th…

I thought most products had legal provisions that prohibit reverse engineering?
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