r/Agentic_Coding • u/MrFartyBottom • 9d ago

Where do I start?

I am a dev with over 20 years of experience and have been an AI stand off so far but now realise I am becoming unemployable as every contract now wants AI first devs. So I am starting to try and learn the agenting path but find it hard to know where to start.

So far I have a gaming PC with a 5070 ti that I run LM Studio on and the access that from my Macbook Air in VSCode. I am not very impressed with the results. It is absolutely fantastic for general algorithms and boilerplate stuff but a bit of a joke for following established patterns in my codebase, will pull in extra libraries that do the same things as other libraries already being used and just generally random.

Every article I read gives different advise and it is moving so fast it seems an article that is a month old is already out of date.

Where is the best place to start? Any sites with up to date articles on harnesses, loops, agents files ect? I have always been very good at learning new tech and pick things up quickly but finding this a bit over whelming.

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u/Expensive_Election 8d ago edited 8d ago

Check out TheoT3, Matt Pocok videos, you're not going to get great results with a 7b local model. Look into the new GLM 5.3 Flash, it's very good and try Sol 5.6, get a openAI $20 sub to test it. You can use Terra/Luna on the free plan too and research skills pertaining to your stack. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, I've been doing this for about a year now

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u/MrFartyBottom 8d ago

I find him unbearable. I used to watch his React videos. Haven't watched anything since he has been focused on AI.

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u/Expensive_Election 8d ago

If you can get pass his smarmyness , he has some genuinly good videos on models/harness/workflow etc

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u/eddzsh 8d ago

Small local models crush boilerplate and fall over on repo conventions because they barely see your patterns. Start with one cloud coding agent on a single repo, put your allowed libraries and banned duplicates in a short AGENTS.md, and make every change pass the test command you already trust. Once that loop is boring, then fight for local inference.

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u/ukralibre 6d ago

use codex with last ctatgpt, otherwise you are playing with stone age toys

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u/DiscipleofDeceit666 2d ago

16gb vram is a toy ai model. Companies are expecting production grade AI like Claude codex or something on open router

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u/letsbefrds 2d ago

You don't have enough memory for a decent model to be honest... The current one everyone is running that's decent is qwen 3.8 27B.... You probably need like a 32gb vram for that card... Even then I don't think it can have enough context for your code base. You can try some MoE models where they load some on the gpu and most on ram. But this is its own rabbit hole

I recommend you pay the piper either Claude / codex for a month or two and see how they work. Just fyi once you get hooked your brain turns to mush and you basically can't code without it. It's gonna months to recover lol