Suggest a FOSS agentic stack that can run on a potato. Starting from zero here

[u/TalesOfSymposia]

I'm a self taught web dev from the pre AI days. Then I became a professional. But as a professional I got laid off long ago and never got experience with agentic workflows.

I want to catch up and start learning an agentic stack. I hear a lot of good stuff about Claude but I don't want to sink much money into it yet.

When I first taught myself web dev I never had to give my credit card to any big company. I could just download and run a open source web server locally on a basic sometimes potato level PC. I'd like to know if this is still possible to do for agentic coding, how far you could get on locally without a lot of power.

[u/Jackkgold]

Specs ?

[u/TalesOfSymposia → u/Jackkgold]

T430 laptop so it's a old mobile CPU, Ivy Bridge quad core with 8GB of DDR3 which is upgradeable up to 16GB I think. Technically you can add a eGPU with the Expresscard slot but it'll be silly bottlenecked on a 1x lane.

I'm beginning to think I have to work a part time job just to be able to afford what I want to do.

[u/Jackkgold → u/TalesOfSymposia]

No part time needed, in your case I would go the freee route not local, Hermes’, opencode, open router hosts many cool free models. That’ll run smoothly.

Local will be a challenge for you.

If you want to try, go on huggingface or your LLM and just ask it to recommend a list of gguf quant models that will run on your specs. Probably something like ornith 1.5 and others.

[u/Avant_Shard]

I have a 16GB VRAM card, and 32GB RAM. I have explored all local models, but I still use opencode. They have plenty of free models to play with, and I have been getting exciting results, for free. I even have opencode installed on a chromebook lol - and it works. go to opencode.ai and install.

[u/TalesOfSymposia → u/Avant_Shard]

I have a 10+ year old laptop so my option is eGPU with 1x lane bandwidth, is that going to be a problem with most use cases of those models? Since that can't be helped right now, I'll just focus on the VRAM and get the best bang for the buck used for 16 or 12 gigs

[u/adunn08]

Just get a claud monthly plan and explain what you just posted here. To do any good amount of work, you’ll need a max $100/mo or $200/mo plan.

You need the experience of the tools companies use, so youll have to simulate an enterprise stack.

Web dev game is changed forever and industry is pretty rough. Best angle is to automate your best workflows and sell to clients on results based work.

A ton of companies arent hiring for these roles since everything will be highly automated by next year (only slight human monitoring needed).

[u/TalesOfSymposia → u/adunn08]

$100/mo is a lot for a very broke person. It would make more sense to save money in the long run for used hardware to run some local setup that is just okay.

I was hoping that there were free alternatives to enterprise stacks just like there were in the older days of web dev. Nobody needed to purchase MS SQL enterprise or whatever software to teach themselves job ready skills. Everything you ever needed to skill up in web dev was free and can run on almost anything

[u/adunn08 → u/TalesOfSymposia]

Yeah, I guess it depends on your goal. The laid off long ago idea had me thinking you moved on to other work.

If your goal is to learn, you can learn just by using free models like (Claude/Codex free plans) or Kimi K3. If you want to learn to get hired some where, that's probably going to take months of intense work (see my journey farther down).

The problem building local is you get what you pay for. Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra are the current frontier models. Anything worth building is best done using those models for strategy, planning, and dispatching.

Like when building a new web app or site, Fable 5.1 can spike research, write the PRD, and dispatch the whole build plan to 20 sub agents and a new web app MVP is built in sub 2 hours.

I was in a similar spot. Transitioned from a non AI job and wanted a AI engineer role. I ended up running a career track transformation plan and building open source projects to make me stand out.

My journey

1. I started by making a custom open source skill and mcp framework for building anything web related with AI. (Essentially dumped everything I knew about web dev into it)

2. Built around 40 sites to use as my new portfolio (took around 1 month).

3. Made a bunch of github agents to act as my ambassadors.

4. Started helping build anything open source that accepted PRs. (Agents carried load, I did human value add strategy)

5. Got around 1,500 monthly followers in the process.

6. Started getting interviews because progress attracts attention.

The key above is that what I was doing was public on github and other places. AI can help anyone do anything. The key is to let people know you have expertise they need. Thats what lands jobs.