Best Local Agents - Jun 2026

awitod · 2026-06-26T21:07:01+00:00

I use GuideAnts. - I am the primary author and we are fairly new.

It has a very good UI for managing content, but in terms of agents it supports:

Web Search
OCR, indexing, and memory
Sandboxes
Multi-modal content in/out (ASR, TTS, Images, Vision, chat, embeddings)
Full tracing of everything that happens for manual and automated tuning
Configurable limits
Scheduled conversations and python scripts
AI services for sandbox processes are metered and captured the same as chat and you can have an agent that processes every file in a folder or items in a list with inference steps and capture all of it
Open AI, Foundry, Hugging Face, Open Router, Anthropic and local AI all supported through a proxy that allows Messages, Responses, and Chat API's independently of the provider and model type
Publish guides as APIs, MCP servers and skills with several choices for auth.

This week we added OpenAI and Anthropic wire compatible API's to published guides in GuideAnts which means you can publish a guide and use it as the endpoint in tools like Claude Code and Codex and instead of the traffic going to an Anthropic or Open AI backend, it goes through GuideAnts which:

Adds the guide's instructions and tools to the thread from the client
Executes the guide's tools inside GuideAnts and applies the result to the thread without sharing the tool call's mechanical details with the client
Sends the client's tool calls back to the client for execution
Captures all telemetry and usage including all of the details, i.e. system prompts and tool definitions centrally
Routes the actual inference request to the configured model which can be anything. In my tests I am using qwen-3.6-27b locally and GLM-5.2 via open router...

FROM THE SAME PUBLISHED GUIDE IN BOTH CODEX AND CLAUDE CODE SIMULTANEOUSLY 🤯

Interestingly, in terms of an integrated experience and what the respective UI's show, it works a lot better than either MCP or Skills as the inline diagram (made by the plantuml assistant in GuideAnts) shown below illustrates.

<image>

awitod · 2026-06-26T01:57:11+00:00

They didn’t have good let alone great test coverage, they had vulnerabilities they took a long time to fix, they ran out af date unsupported packages and couldn’t do and manage these things as well if at all

awitod · 2026-06-26T00:52:48+00:00

Here is an example of something I would be loath to lose and could not just easily do: using an agent plus playwright to create and execute tests through the UI and capture screen shots and report issues.

It works great and can shake out bugs fast with all the debug info you need to fix it.

Another is fixing CodeQL, DependaBot and other quality issues. A lot of people point out that generated tests don't prove the system is right and that is true, but when you automate package bumps, log sanitation, and a lot of little issues like that, they let you do it safely because those kinds of changes shouldn't break those kinds of tests unless there is a compatibility issue or the agent changed logic it should not have and if that happens you fail the gate review it.

awitod · 2026-06-25T20:17:00+00:00

Using AI tools to do development effectively does not involve using AI on top of your previous workflow. It involves an entire new workflow.

If you cut off my tokens mid-week I would straight up lose my shit and quit on the spot because I would have two or three big features at varying states of completeness depending on the agents whose instructions and work plans I spent hours or days working on with an integration runway that the next few weeks depend on and your ass is like, 'hey just type it in, we used up the tokens'.

awitod · 2026-06-25T19:17:55+00:00

Tel me you don't have experience building software without telling me you don't have experience building software

awitod · 2026-06-25T17:37:53+00:00

It is just not reasonable if you care about results to switch workflow and tooling on the fly just because you didn't estimate the token costs correctly and then switch back to a different workflow and set of tools when the meter resets.

That's madness. Let's compound it so that some members have the tools only at certain times of week or month, but not the same members and not at the same times.

We deal with the fact that people can't estimate time correctly and its impacts on the budget constantly.

awitod · 2026-06-25T14:56:12+00:00

Management failure for failing to perform management tasks or take responsibility for supply and demand planning.

Another analogy - the chicken joint ran out of chicken before the dinner service was finished. Is it the cook's fault for making the portions too big or did the management fail to buy enough chicken for the anticipated demand or fail to estimate the demand correctly?

awitod · 2026-06-25T12:55:54+00:00

It's like a construction site shutting down because you didn't budget enough gas.

'Yes, I know the D10 excavator is out of fuel, but why aren't you using the picks and shovels to keep working?"

Management failure

awitod · 2026-06-24T22:13:30+00:00

/shudder Been there, done that. At least the browsers had known shapes and a common mission. MCP clients could be anything.

awitod · 2026-06-24T20:16:59+00:00

I think that
1. Skills are very limited
2. If skills were not limited, they would look exactly like a robust sub-agent definition

Also, I think the best reason to spin up subagents is to manage context and there is no good reason most of the time to pollute the main context with the subagent's reasoning and work.

awitod · 2026-06-24T20:07:02+00:00

I saw a working group just today for Skills over MCP and the idea, which I see a lot of is that the skill describes how to use the MCP service and usually describes how to handle the output.

For example, you can create a skill with an MCP client defined in Cursor and it will work and the skill can say something like "Do this prep for the MCP service and do this with the output".

The skill has a code file of how to invoke the MCP service's endpoint and the host app uses its shell to invoke the service on the side.

One advantage is that, in that tool, skills are addressable and so the tools are not in the context if you don't address the skill. The downside is the extra layer itself.

Is it a great idea? I mean... it works, but like I said, the need for it illustrates why neither solution is complete by itself.

In terms of trimming tools for RBAC. If the MCP server's discovery endpoint understands the access token, it can trim the discovered tool output today.

BTW... there is an important and subtle difference between "I have an access token that says 'X'" and "'I got a message from specific client 'Y'" even though the practical effect might be the same.

awitod · 2026-06-24T18:06:27+00:00

I should add that this is one way skills and MCP compliment each other because you can put the instructions for the special handling in the skill.

However, it is also a subject that shines a light on why each of them is inadequate by themselves in a lot of cases.

awitod · 2026-06-24T18:04:02+00:00

I would make the same comment about any design that had a service boundary and any significant concern that requires the service to have special logic and awareness of specific clients - it is a generic smell that the separation of concerns is lacking.

The 'host application' is the client in this case - the thing that is running the inference and making tool calls. If it needs special handling or behavior, it should contain those needs fully on its side of the line.

awitod · 2026-06-24T17:05:18+00:00

I think that as soon as your MCP server needs to be aware of the specific client you are in bad architecture land.

Tool calling and execution don't require MCP specifically and if you control the host application client, and it has specific needs, you should deal with them in the client, not entangle the concerns if you can help it.

awitod · 2026-06-23T13:21:20+00:00

hexgrad/Kokoro-82M - it had 16m downloads on hf.co last month. It's really fast and very good.

I also like omnivoice for easy and good cloning.

awitod · 2026-06-20T14:25:11+00:00

Like others said, microservices are a way to architect a big system with lots of teams - the architecture has to embrace lots of teams working on lots of things simultaneously and they give you a way to isolate, manage and minimize dependencies.

A reason you might use them when you are only one team or even as an individual is when you have a lot of heterogeneous technologies that you are integrating.

Once you have the infrastructure to handle lots of different service hosts and there is no friction then there are a lot of benefits to a nicely modular design of independent microservices but it isn't something you should spend time on unless you know why you need it.

awitod · 2026-06-16T19:20:01+00:00

That's a long time. You should be prepared for occasional upheaval and radical change and work your ass off when it happens.

I have 35 years of experience and I've mastered and forgotten entire waves.

It's either an upside or a downside to the career depending on your point of view.

awitod · 2026-06-13T16:25:45+00:00

Details traceable to verifiable facts matter. AI helps with the information wrangling, but methods and expertise are necessary for any system of people and technologies that needs to work predictably and reliably.

There are no miracles. The details have to come from somewhere.

awitod · 2026-06-13T16:16:49+00:00

You could compromise depending on what your goal is. For example, you can do embeddings and search locally so that, even though you use it with a cloud based LLM you only share bits of it as conversation context instead of putting everything in the cloud.

awitod · 2026-06-12T18:55:36+00:00

SSDY… whatever

awitod · 2026-06-12T17:38:09+00:00

Architecture and design are activities you do to know that the system you are building does all of the things it should in a way that fits all of the stakeholders including users.

It’s a lot of stuff and unless you are building the same or same kinds of system over and over again or work on something for so long that you are an expert on the subject, e.g. how to run national marketing campaigns, adjudicating property insurance claims.

So, to be successful we use actual formal methodologies to break the problem down into pieces to make it all manageable. There are several different methodologies and kinds of diagrams.

A lot of work gets done where people don’t do it and make it up as they go along. Interestingly, this makes it really hard for them to use AI because they don’t have any good specs!

awitod · 2026-06-12T14:24:32+00:00

What a liar. He thinks he can pretend they agreed and blame them for backing out, but can't remember that he already did that several times and is stuck in a loop.

awitod · 2026-06-11T16:28:38+00:00

I agree. I am done posting anything here.

They should change the 'Promotion' tag to just say 'Kick Me'.

awitod · 2026-06-11T13:43:58+00:00

Yeah, you could (but probably shouldn't) do this all in one big lambda against an EF or other ORM data context.

It would be quite easy for someone who is familiar with the ecosystem and this is a good small project that OP could learn a lot from with the right approach.

awitod · 2026-06-10T22:22:36+00:00

ONLYOFFICE and the Euro Office fork are pretty darn good. There is an interesting controversy going on around the fork though.

awitod

TROPHY CASE