Blogs

This week I trialed a second local coding agent, Hermes from Nous Research, on my own MacBook Pro M3 Max, pointed at the same local Qwen 3.8 model I already run. I installed it additively, so nothing already working could break, governed it with manual approvals, and did not stop until it proved it behaves. Here is the trial, in tables and screenshots. One housekeeping note before the story. Last week’s post got called AI slop on Reddit. My full answer to that, and the standing standard I now hold my writing to, lives on its own page: On Slop, And Who Gets To Call It That. It is not the point of this post, so I moved it out of the way. Back to Hermes. ...

A reader on Reddit asked me a sharp question about my last post. I had trialed a second local coding agent, Hermes, pointed at the same local Qwen 3.8 model my other agent already uses. His question was simple. Did I ever run both agents at the same time, two separate harnesses hammering one model on one Mac at once. And what about Hermes spawning its own sub-agents against that same endpoint. Is any of that predictable. ...

TL;DR Local models are how I run my community work, my volunteer projects, my side hustles, and my musings. Two reasons, both simple: Cost. None of this work should bill against a frontier account. Trust. Client and customer data stays on my own disk, away from the labs. Bottom line up front: I am running Qwen3.8-27B (4-bit) on my MacBook Pro M3 Max, 128 GB of unified memory and a 40-core GPU, my personal dev rig, driven by an OpenCode harness. ...

TL;DR My agents do real work on frontier models. Every dollar of that work is metered against my OpenAI and Anthropic bills. Meanwhile a perfectly capable local model, gpt-oss:20b, sits on a Mac Mini in my office costing me nothing. The obvious question: for which tasks could the free local model do the job just as well? Today I answered it with a system instead of a guess. I taught my eval framework to automatically replay every writing task on the local model right after the frontier model runs it, then grade both with the same judge and record the gap. The result across 10 like-for-like rematches: a mean quality delta of -0.05 — statistical parity — and four tasks where the local model actually scored higher than the frontier model, by as much as 1.7 points. ...

A few weeks ago I asked an agent to pick up work on one of my own projects. It opened a fresh terminal, looked around, found nothing it recognized, and built a brand new copy of a project I already had. That was not the agent being careless. Nothing on the machine had ever told it where the real one lived. The only map of my own work was a memory in my head, and a memory does not survive contact with a machine where agents do the building. ...

Every morning one of my agents sends me a clean status report. Posts cross-posted. Messages delivered. Contacts processed. For a while I read those reports the way you read a receipt from a cashier you trust. Then the automation started giving me time back, so I sat down to run a retrospective and checked the reports against what was actually on disk. The trust did not survive contact with the evidence. ...

By the end of this post you will know what every iteration of every production agent must produce BEFORE it decides anything: four small artifacts that catch the failures sharper prompts cannot prevent. You will know why “tell the model to be careful” never worked as a defense, and why the only durable fix is structural. And you will know what the discipline looks like in code, because we have been running it at MACONA for months and the receipts are public. ...

By the end of this post you will know which of the five infrastructure control points your agent stack is shipping without, and you will have a concrete pattern for paying down the observability piece of that debt: a public, consumer-readable audit-trail receipt that satisfies both your security team and your finance team with the same document. The receipt was already in production when the broader practitioner conversation started naming the gap. ...

Update, 2026-05-19: A2A agent-card now live at mcp.adotob.com/.well-known/agent.json, published 24 hours after Nate B Jones’s IO-2026 video named the agent-card primitive as the second of the four core agent-protocol layers. Three of the four layers of the open-protocol stack are now live in the storefront: MCP for tool access, A2A for agent discovery, and AG-UI manifested as the public receipt page. AP2/X402 is reserved for the MVP-2 paid Stripe flow. By the end of this post you’ll have two public URLs you can forward to your security team AND your finance team — and both audits get satisfied by the same document. That document is an agent receipt. The two URLs are real receipts produced by the same MCP endpoint, one driven by Anthropic-hosted Claude Desktop and the other driven by Qwen3.6 27B running fully offline on my MacBook. The point of this post is why that one-artifact-two-ledgers property matters more than the technology that produces it. ...

TL;DR I volunteer with MACONA, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that ships food, medicine, feminine hygiene products, donated computers, and clothing to communities and schools in West Africa. For a few few monthis now I have run a small autonomous AI agent fleet for the organization: five named agents, cron-driven, running through OpenClaw on a simple Windows box. Week 19 (I track progress via week numbers for me and my Agents) looked like a win on every internal activity metric: 17 reliability PRs merged, 2 awareness-day blog posts published, 1 Brevo campaign queued, and 37 cold introduction emails sent. ...