For the longest time, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to “survive” in this new AI age without having to fork over a ton of money just to keep up. I’ve tried using local models via Ollama, and while they definitely work to a degree, they’re (unsurprisingly) not as good as the big model providers.

The local models tend to

  • Forget what they’re doing
  • Struggle to break larger tasks into smaller ones
  • Lose focus easily
  • Have weaker coding performance
  • Drift over longer sessions

So to improve the reliability of fully local, smaller models (and to keep all my data local and in my own network), I created Coyote.

It’s a local-first, batteries-included command line tool and runtime for building and running LLM workflows locally. It’s model agnostic and supports things like

  • Agents and agent delegation
  • Roles/personas
  • MCP Servers
  • RAG
  • Custom tools
  • Macros
  • Workflow Scripting

A lot of the features it supports are specifically designed to compensate for weaknesses in smaller local models. For example:

  • Auto continuation to keep pushing models to completion instead of stopping halfway through problems
  • Parallel agent delegation so tasks can be split into smaller, focused scopes
  • Workflow-based execution (“If this, do that”) for building more reliable and repeatable automations

It also supports the major cloud providers if you want them (which definitely helped while testing 😄), but my long-term goal is simple:

Get as close as possible to Claude Code-style reliability using fully local models.

I’m always open to feedback, questions, or ideas.

Repo: https://github.com/Dark-Alex-17/coyote

  • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    That’s only if you use the default Build agent with the built-in prompt (https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/dev/packages/opencode/src/session/prompt/default.txt), and yes it is quite large.

    It’s trivial to create custom agents in opencode.json with custom prompts, tools, whatever…

    For example I have created a Personal agent which handles menial stuff such as searching/editing my notes, appointments, tasks… with a restricted set of tools and skills.

    The single most important change I made is only allowing the local provider in the config, which disables all cloud providers. IMHO this should be the default but I’m not complaining. It’s the best open-source harness I’ve tried so far. I want to try pi.dev someday (quite minimal, needs a good amount of setup and tuning).

    I also argue that some local models actually behave much better with a semi-large system prompt (qwen 3.6 for example tends to lose itself in reasoning if you only use the default You are a helpful assistant system prompt and a basic Say hi user prompt - opencode-like large system prompts fixes this; even if you lose some time for initial prompt loading)