I played with classifying and summarizing my entire email history (per email) with small models, but that only took about 12h of GPU time at most. Using a coding agent cli wrapper in that case is far slower because of all the spin up cost and the system prompt they inject even if you want to turn it all off.

If I used an actual direct API it probably would've been much faster, but I'm doing it for hobby / fun reasons. You also get to fiddle with a lot more params.