Local models are meaningfully useful* for agentic work now. This is a realization I came to over the last day or so.
I wrote a lot of custom mods for a game that recently switched engines. The migration is going rather smooth for most people because of wise architectural choices from the dev early on, and because they prioritized backwards compatibility in the update. But there are still some rough edges, especially if you had your hooks deep into the engine.
I recently vibeforked Unbiased Bob’s fork of Strata to make it compatible, easy to use and optimized for my OS and hardware (NixOS 5800x3d 64gb, 7900xtx 24gb). Sol 6.1 got it working with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next IQ3 XSS (~75GB) at roughly 46tps 164k ctx with enough headroom to launch a heavy browser along with a triple-A game set to low in 720p for testing when I need to (plus space for zram swap)
I set it up in deepseek harness, gave it a 14MB error log in the game’s working directory, then went to sleep. I woke up and it had run for 3 hours. The game launched with only two errors, which it quickly fixed from the new, vastly smaller logfile.
It hammered down every issue, making changes across 30 separate mod repos. Practically a one-shot, and all the features worked as originally intended.
I left a local coding agent running completely on its own for three hours across multiple repos across a dozen auto-compactions with a log file and no ability for it to verify its work besides a compiler. And it produced meaningful results. I can’t speak to the code quality, but it worked. This was completely unthinkable even just two years ago. Even one year ago, the cloud frontier wouldn’t be able to do this on its own, and now a local model can, running on my consumer gaming hardware from one or two gens back.
“Huh… So… We’re here now…" I said to myself, with a bit of stunned disbelief, wondering what the future one or two years from now might hold.
AI creates sounds, not music.
I made a DOS port of Tetris Attack for the first IBM PC. The audio hardware is a single buzzer. I created the engine for music and sound effects, by hand, from scratch… at 4.77 MHz. I had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t. The parts which aren’t that-sounds-right repetition are just turning column heights into notes.
Is that music? That slapdash bespoke effort, in the dire absence of any formal training, on toy hardware? Because if my bullshit counts then I’m not clear how any danceable formulaic realization of proper western music theory would not count… and if my bullshit doesn’t count then I’m not sure what the point is in puffing up human effort over perfectly fine artificial results.
No. lol! It’s not music. It’s computerized sounds. Did you write the music?? Score the different instruments? Wat it your original composition?
Creating music is a SKILL. A talent that someone sharpened over years of repetition, learning, practice, and love. So, no…. You didn’t make music. You programmed a computer to make sounds that OTHER people created.
I am the only human being responsible for the audio in that game. There are no other people, fool. Every beat and trill is me using the buzzer as an instrument. If using randomness to fill in some variety is disqualifying, you’re picking a fight with the entire medium of process music. Nobody wrote out each performance of “In C” beforehand, so it’s only Terry Riley and friends noodling around, yeah?
Do you think Bobby Prince wasn’t a musician, just because he worked in MIDI? He didn’t play an actual harpsichord on “Into Sandy’s City,” so nuh uh, doesn’t count. The computer did it! For some reason! Guess it was feeling spooky that morning.
Or do you simply think bad music is not music? No true Scotsman can make music unless they have skill! Straight up gatekeeping amateur effort. Can amateurs then play music? Does someone fumbling their way through a solo comprise some different process? Because if that’s where your philosophy lands, there’s a hilarious counterexample in James Hetfield working out “Master Of Puppets.”
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I wrote music my-fucking-self in a sound engine I wrote my-fucking-self. Zero AI was involved, you illiterate troll. I built my own goddamn instrument to give my game a soundtrack, within some obscene technical constraints. Fuck your blinding prejudice against anything besides how you were taught.
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Geez, you should lay off being a prat for a while, Mr. AI.
I can pick up a synthesizer which does nothing but produce prerecorded sounds and hit random things till it sounds good. If someone enjoys it they would call it music.
Slop generated music ain’t any different. Music and art as a whole is in the eye of the behold. Only a raging asshole tries to tell people what is or isn’t art to them.
It doesn’t have to be art to you. But no one else gives a fuck what you or I or anyone else thinks. Because only their own opinion matters when it comes to what they believe is art.
LMAO… the keyboard/synthesiser bullshit? Really?
No dude. Richard Wright of Pink Floyd was a classically trained pianist. He did not “hit random things till it sounded good”.
Ffs! What a fucking parhrtic argument!
No one hits random shit until it sounds good. That’s called noise. You clearly know absolutely nothing about music. Seriously…. Just go sit down.
Gooseworx hit random shit until it sounded good. She’s famously self-taught. Her soundtrack for The Amazing Digital Circus is fantastic.
What do you think classical training is, besides an effort to explain and share which noises sound good, in a particular context? You’d tell us the first humans to bang rocks together to form a beat weren’t really making music, because those cavemen hadn’t invented the art degree.
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We’re not talking about AI here. Gooseworx is a real human person, who wrote the music for her viral hit show using a normal meatspace electronic keyboard. Or does composition not count unless the keys are made of dead elephant bones?
You don’t know what an argument is. You’re just spitting at people and cruising for a moderator’s boot up the ass.
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Wildest goal post changing today lol
Music you know well was made from a preset sample. The new akais break copyrighted music into separate stems using generative AI. Illegal by pink pantheress has like a billion plays. That’s like three notes and it DOES sound like she just pressed a few. Listen to it. I’m not a musician but I’m married to one and know a lot. None of them are trained.
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Alright, I used it to organize my AI-generated sounds.
Feel better? Swapping those words had exactly zero impact on what was actually done. The labels you use don’t make any practical observable difference.
It make the world of difference to people that actually create music. Imagine you spent your lifetime learning and perfecting a craft, then along comes a kid with a 3d printer and calls himself a craftsman.
Suck to be you it seems then. Grow up.
But that’s not what he said. He didn’t call himself a musician. He said he created music. He did. It’s undeniably music.
A person 3d printing does not call themselves a craftsman. They say they created objects. And they undeniably create objects.
I’m sorry you’re struggling with the AI stuff. As a developer, I’ve gone through stages of grief too. I can’t deny reality tho, this is my livelihood. It’s a tool. I use it.
Right, the vaguely defensible ‘that’s not art!’ breaks down as we move away from that broad abstract term. People have looked at paintings made by actual human beings and asked: ‘but is it art?’ You cannot see a Github repository with Claude as an author and scoff, ‘that’s not code!’ For starters: the compiler disagrees.
An AI render is not a drawing, because nobody drew it, and it’s not a photo, because it didn’t happen, but anyone insisting it’s not an image is playing stupid word games. Like the pixels don’t look like anything to them. Saying a sequence of notes in western tuning and 4/4 time with a verse-chorus-verse structure is just “noises” is at least that silly.
More generally, nobody worth listening to can look at a page of printed words and say, ‘that’s not a text.’ Everything is a fucking text.
It’s not music. And it’s not stages of grief. You like it because it does your job for you. I despise it because it allows talentless hacks to pretend they are my equal when I spent my life on this craft. They’re ruining culture. It’s slop.
End of story.
I suggest therapy as it’s not going to stop.
Cool story. I suggest you get used to being called a hack. Because it’s not going to stop.
Says the prat.
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Imagining. In such a situation I’d resist the urge to join a 3d printing forum and interject myself into their conversations with nothing worthwhile to add aside from my “um, actually” semantic quibbling. Because I’m not an ass and if the kid’s having a good time more power to him, it’s no skin off my back.
But you do you I guess.
Yeah, however, imagine that those kids are ruining your industry. But let me guess. You’d be totally fine with that, right?
You see, It’s hacks like… it’s hacks- that pretend to know what they’re doing by punching adjectives into a prompt and producing artificial music, or artificial art that are taking jobs away from talented people that actually work hard to produce their product.
And for the record…. I’m not here to get internet points kid, as a musician of stage and studio for over 30 years….
I’m here to say what needs to be said.
It’s the AI that is “ruining” your industry and not the fucking record labels and Spotify who has made it a broke bitch career to be a musician. Sure.
The record labels aren’t pretending to be musicians.
In fact, I am.
I’m a professional programmer. 20 years experience, it’s where I earn my money, got a university degree and everything. And we’re here in a thread about how not only are AI models good at programming, even small local models are good at programming. I use them myself, I give advice on how to use them, I ask advice on how to use them. I think they’re really neat and look forward to using them more, and encourage everyone else to also use them.
Sure, some people have no idea what they’re doing and they end up writing not very good software. My reaction to that is to try to explain to them what they did wrong and how they can get better. Or, if their not-very-good software is still perfectly good for whatever they’re using it for, I give them a little thumbs up and say “good on you, just make sure you know what you’ve got there.”
No, you’re here to interject yourself into a conversation that was not at all about AI music to push your personal dislike of AI music and to insult people who don’t share your view of AI music.
It doesn’t need to be said. Certainly not here and now.
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Dude you can just say your an ass and don’t like people having fun. It’s ok, we have all been 20 before.
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Typically shit like this is said by people that don’t make art or if they do dont sell it.
And since you’ve got beef with 3d printers, too. You jelly?
Lmao… typically shit like this told by kids that think they’re musicians because they punched a few adjectives into a prompt. I play three instruments and have been on stage up and down both coasts of the US.
Talk about jelly some more.
Define music.
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Why are you in a space for people talking about local AI models? I don’t go into politically conservative places and tell them I’m not engaging with their bullshit.
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I purposefully try not ban people and places so as to not fall into an echo chamber, but I’m not going into a place I know I’m going to hate it and complaining. For example, I’m grossed out by the furry porn around here so I blocked it. A rare block from me, but ya gotta lay some rules out.
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Then why post your opinion in the first place?
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You have the perfect self-descriptive name: you’re a prat about AI.
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You chose it, not me. I’m just complimenting you on how perfect it is. Perfectly stupid? Maybe; but still perfect.