I've dabbled a bit in GitHub Copilot using Claude Opus and Sonnet models via work, but I couldn't shake the thought that we weren't allowed to use this on any of our clients' codebases. Having been a fan of Ollama, I wanted to try something truly local.

First I tried OpenCode but they unexpectedly make external requests (!) even when using Ollama (I noticed when Ollama wasn't properly connected and I still got a title generated).

So I settled for Pi, but I strongly disliked the idea that the agent could, at any point, decide to delete files or exfiltrate .env secrets. So I created Picosa (https://github.com/GreenpantsDeveloper/Picosa), containerizing and sandboxing Pi, with firewall rules such that it could only ever reach the local network (for Ollama), scoped by just the current working directory, and nothing else. Combined with Qwen3.6:35b, it works surprisingly well, and I could ask it to improve itself when run on its own repository.