Testing an offline coding agent in the Himalayas
In brief
- An engineer tests an offline coding agent from the Himalayas using OpenCode, Ollama and Qwen3.5 9B.
- The local setup fixes a bug in a Python project without an internet connection.
- The agent uses existing tests to validate changes and requires 12-16 GB of RAM.
A Thomson Reuters engineer tested a fully offline coding agent from the foothills of the Himalayas. According to the article, he used OpenCode, Ollama and the Qwen3.5 9B model to fix a bug in a local project without an internet connection.
The author details the technical setup: installing the tools, downloading the Qwen3.5 9B model (6.6 GB), configuring OpenCode to point to local Ollama, and running offline tests. The process successfully corrected a calculation error in a Python script, validated by built-in tests. The article also mentions other options like Aider and alternative models, as well as external benchmark results on coding capabilities.
This experiment shows that a coding agent can run offline for local tasks, but remains limited to projects already available on the machine. The author emphasizes the need to plan for dependencies and sufficient RAM (12-16 GB for Qwen3.5 9B).
This summary gives you the essentials. The full article, its figures and quotes are on Latent Space.
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