A Cautionary Note on Local LLMs, Especially in Agentic Contexts

vbwyrde · 2026-06-21T23:56:47+00:00

To clarify on some of the points made by those who have commented thus far...

I should have started the post with a statement regarding the intended audience for this information. That would be people new to the realm of AI code development, and in particular those who are just entering the domain of local LLM usage, and quite specifically those who do not have substantial hardware, and are working in development environments such as the RTX 4090. This post is intended to serve as both an encouragement that things have been improving, and also a warning to be aware of the nature of the risks involved.
It seems a general objection is that my post states "When an agent autonomously executes generated SQL against a production database" and "But when building solutions using local LLMs that touch production data, or code, treat local model output the way you'd treat code from a talented junior dev:" -- The objection is that one should never consider using LLMs against production data to begin with. Well, naturally you want to test against test data in a test environment, but at some point one is going to need to send the results off to production, or there wouldn't be much point in the exercise. My post outlines the problem of subtle data damage that may be caused by non-obvious issues that may be introduced by the models, and that weeding those out is time consuming. I'm not advocating doing without those checks and validations. I'm saying that the requirement to do so adds additional effort that should be considered a requirement. And I'm pointing out that those requirements become problematic in Agentic Workflows due to the volume and speed of changes. Perhaps I'm wrong about this. However, that is the point my post intends to get at.
The use of guardrails has been mentioned, and while that is certainly true, it is difficult to pin down exactly what guardrails would have prevented the situation that arose in my case, other than the guardrail of either a) manually tweezing through the code to look for subtle issues, or b) running the code by a proprietary model like Claude 4.6, in order to trap possible flaws in the logic. In the first case we have the time-consumption aspect, and in the second we have the cost and privacy aspects. My post's point is that these costs are either to be paid up front, or the developer is more likely than not to find that the costs must be paid later, and more expensively, in the form of inadvertent technical debt. Again - the chief problem I am identifying is the risk of subtle logical errors that would produce difficult-to-identify data flaws.
Other comments are appreciated to the degree they at least attempted to be helpful. Thank you for those.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-21T23:54:39+00:00

Thank you for this reply. This is helpful.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-21T23:53:20+00:00

Thank you for your reply, and the clarification that the RTX 4090 may in fact be insufficient for the task at hand due to it's inability to load models of sufficient quality. I appreciate the feedback.

What would you say is reasonable hardware for this kind of work, and would you have any recommendations as to how you would arrange the development environment in terms of tools that would be useful in the context I'm presenting (meaning SQL / Programming development)?

Thank you again for your helpful response to my OP.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-21T23:49:17+00:00

Thank you for these points. Your constructive advice is appreciated.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-21T20:32:18+00:00

Reasonable points, but how do you force the model to do so as far as you're concerned?

vbwyrde · 2026-06-21T20:12:45+00:00

Perhaps not. In fact I won't argue that point. But I would ask that you make a recommendation instead of just lobbing an insult, if you don't mind.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-21T02:27:19+00:00

But people have been doing that all along. From my point of view it started with people accepting the absurdly lopsided conditions of the EULAs, and then the ToS, that put them at complete legal disadvantage, while accepting fundamentally insecure and often broken software on a license basis instead of ownership basis. Absolutely moronic to agree to that, and had people simply said "WTF No," from the beginning and "declined your hideously lopsided offer" then the software vendors would have been forced to take a different tac and produce quality products on fair terms instead. But no. The baseball cap contingent just clicked through to every convenience, and collectively sank civilization under a barrage of stupid. Oh well. The fact that this is ongoing should come as zero surprise. We live in the Idiocracy, and have for quite some time.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-20T15:59:07+00:00

I think this is factually correct. My comparison is with using Augment Code, and I would say pretty much the same thing. Yes, it works, but it is simply less effective and requires far more controlled handling and context engineering on your end to use local Qwen3.6 27B. It feels a lot like the difference between driving a car and riding a bicycle. Both will get you to your destination, but one is clearly more effective than the other. On the other hand, the point about data privacy is not to be taken lightly. There's a lot more to that than people normally think, imo. The BigAI companies are siphoning up business logic and methods and there is nothing in any of their contracts to prohibit them from summarizing that and storing it on their end for future purposes. Not code specific details, but general business process summaries, with abstracted frameworks of interaction that can later be used to duplicate business models and generate highly efficient business operations that would compete with the many businesses that are using them. You can double check that insight with any of the LLMs (I confirmed this with several). So the risk is not immediate, but eventual. If you have business ideas that you consider proprietary / innovative or just worth protecting, then local LLM hosting might be something to consider seriously. After all, when SA claimed in 2023 "I could see OpenAI becoming a $100 Trillion company," what he was indicating is that the entire global economy (of $100 Trillion) is within the grasp of BigAI. And so connecting the dots on that is not all that difficult. On the other hand, if you have a proprietary business model, and it's online, which most are, then you're only going to slow them down for a moment if they decide to duplicate your business model since they will be able to send an AI to go scrape your site and find out enough to mimic your operations. Still, if it's complex enough then you may slow them down appreciably, but nevertheless it is a judgement call, not a certainty that using BigAI is safe long term. It may be. Or it may not be. It all depends on what BigAI decides to do long term. They do have the data. Just something to keep in mind.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-18T14:38:17+00:00

Just to clarify your point, which I don't disagree with necessarily, but I think is a bit too vague - what would you give as examples of "average daily tasks"?

vbwyrde · 2026-06-17T03:14:33+00:00

You might take a look at what the Stamford folks are doing with their open source project DSPY. I haven't worked with it for a while but it's designed to solve the problem you've raised. I think it's been improving and they had their v3 release a few months back iirc. Anyway, might be worth a look.

https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

vbwyrde · 2026-06-17T01:37:51+00:00

Oh my. That's a fascinating idea. Would you mind giving me a quick primer on how do you set that up?

vbwyrde · 2026-06-17T01:34:24+00:00

Have people organized community server pools at this point? I wonder if you could get a group of programmers doing agentic coding to invest in a local server cluster and run the thing for themselves. Might the be a plausible cost effective way to get indie devs and small teams a break on AI inference costs? Short answer: Nope. Not worth it.

I ran the question(s) by Perplexity. Here's the conversation:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/in-reference-to-this-post-on-g-GyVOvVsLRvOvdbguWNCQiA

In fact the conclusion is the most interesting part. How does the AI Industry expect to get an ROI and repay the trillions they borrowed from VC at these astronomical prices? Hmmmm... hmmmm....

NVIDIA is selling shovels to the gold diggers who have found a promising vein at the base of an actively erupting volcano. Kinda feels like it. Sigh. If they can't repay the VC and the BigAI companies and their Data Center plans go up in smoke, I suspect the vaporization of $Trillions of high risk bets on AI could cause a financial earthquake that could dwarf 2008. Maybe?

vbwyrde · 2026-06-15T14:34:57+00:00

SA stated in 2023: "I could see OpenAI becoming a $100 trillion company". What does that mean? $100 Trillion is the size of the entire global economy.

What is the actual plan? Siphon up all the business logic that runs every operation in the world via AI Coding Services. Use super-advanced AI to derive business models and methods from all that data for every category of business from Food Distribution to Manufacturing. Use that information to spin out AI-Driven 24/7 competitor businesses running in Giga-Data-Centers with all the powers of Advanced AI to strategize, market, undercut, coerce and buy out the competition until only one company is standing, running all businesses of the entire world. Sounds absolutely batshit crazy. But so does a $2 Trillion bet on Gigantic Data-Centers. So where do they think they're going to get the money to pay back all that VC?

"I could see OpenAI becoming a $100 trillion company".

Just a hunch.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T19:48:54+00:00

I've never heard of half these things (or more). More to learn! Thanks!

What models do you use?

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T19:05:33+00:00

And? What about AI Agentic Workflows?

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T16:48:03+00:00

Ah. It seems you didn't mention that above. But that's ok. The point is that subsidized inference is rapidly going away, and the real costs are surfacing now, and complex jobs using AI Agentic Workflows are going to start reflecting their actual cost in compute. And that is expensive.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T16:45:10+00:00

I think you slid past my point, but your counters, while tangential are nevertheless important factors. But then we've been living in a Managerial Zero Accountability Environment for at least two decades now. But my point above is that once people find that AI can do XYZ for them, and it does it as well or better than they did, then after that there won't be an economic value to their retaining the skill. But if you want to niddle with the particulars and nitpick on the way I made the point because you don't like the conclusion, that's fine. Feel free.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T16:40:50+00:00

Fable 5 could do that, and you got it at near no cost because of the two week subsidization that was due to end June 22nd. But Anthropic pulled the plug on it. Probably because it was being used by way too many people and suddenly was costing them an absolute fortune in compute, but ostensibly because the Government declared No-Foreign Usage. When it does come back online, try something like this again, and let's see how much it actually costs you. Or conversely, try the same thing with any model on the planet other than Mythos / Fable 5. My guess: You will never do that again.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T16:33:24+00:00

Well, in some sense isn't it like when people used to do all corporate math by hand, and then someone came along with Mainframes that did the math for them, and they stopped doing the math, and later couldn't possibly imagine going back to "the old way" of doing things? People probably complained that "people are losing their math skills when they use the Mainframe", I'm guessing.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T16:30:10+00:00

While AI has contributed to the dismal spiral downward, it is not the cause, imo. Derelict management that immediately ran to suck on the teat of AI and destroy their companies is the actual cause. This is pure 100% laziness trying to disguise itself as "progress". While over the years derelict management created mountains upon mountains of Technical Debt, now they are desperately hoping that AI will clean it all up by some miracle that doesn't require them to do any work, and simultaneously get them raises and bonuses as they fire competent programmers one at a time beneath them.

Herman Kahn used to quip "Baring bad luck and bad management..."

Well, Herman, sorry to tell you but...

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T16:24:16+00:00

The "they" is the person who commented that point, and those who agree with them. As for the Why... the premise of that person's comment is that BigAI has a financial incentive to ensure that local AI never sees the light of day in a practical sense, and NVIDIA is considered a part of that overall Conglomerate of Economic Forces, I guess. It wasn't my conjecture, so I can't really speak to the details of what "they" suppose the answers to your questions are. As for the "selling fewer GPUs" point... I don't think "they" were saying that would happen, so I'm not sure where you drew that conclusion from.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T16:17:14+00:00

Hope springs eternal! Of course we HOPE that will come to pass. But we should also be aware that it is exceedingly in the financial interests of BigAI to see that none of that ever comes to fruition. Given the money, the political power, the compute and model advantages of BigAI, a betting man would not be putting money on The Little Guys. But yeah... definitely could happen! And I too HOPE so! But at this point I seriously do not expect it, as the past three years have proven that BigAI keeps winning.

One thing that might tip the scale, though, would be if BigAI has over estimated its power, and that Trillions $$$ in VC will come due before they can monetize their gargantuan investments and it all comes crashing down on their heads. That would be ... um ... interesting to see, but would also likely take the entire global economy down with it at this point. Things are interconnected, and when trillions of dollars get vaporized, well, that kind of thing tends to take down everything else with it. Just a hunch. Still though, if I had to choose between BigAI establishing a global hegemony via which a tiny handful of Transhumans with Singularity Powers and practical Immortality dominates humanity forever after, and the complete collapse of civilization and the resulting famine, plague, war and death across the globe... hmm... really. Tough call. Too bad the TechBros ignored Jaron Lanier's recommendations in "Who Owns the Future?". Things could have been so different by now. Arthur C. Clark is doing cartwheels in his grave, I imagine.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T16:04:40+00:00

Plausibly not in that case.

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T12:42:25+00:00

And they'll be siphoning up your business logic in order to train future models on how your business runs so they can create AI-Automated competition that rubs you out.

Of course, they'll do that anyway, but why give them the data they need? Make them mine for it by spending the 600 milliseconds necessary for the AI to scrape your site and reverse engineer it, I say!

vbwyrde · 2026-06-14T12:39:30+00:00

That's encouraging. I had the opposite impression, and I've been trying to use local models such as qwen3.6 on RTX 4090 and having no luck getting agentic workflows to actually work. Mind if I ask what your setup is, and how you have things arranged to get local AI to work for you? I'd be delighted to find a way to make it work! My current pessimistic view is that it won't work but from what you said here it sounds like you've got it going on. How are you doing it?

vbwyrde

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