I just had a sunday afternoon request for a solution to a trivial but annoying spammer pattern on a stackoverflow-like site I maintain.

The software has a plugin API. I asked Muse Glimmer to recommend a plugin — it found one but I tested it and it didn't work for unclear reasons (among other things the software installed version is old, the plugin older). I then asked it to outline how to implement a simple word filter, it gave me an overview of some hooks that looked right from dim-and-distant-past recollection of reading the docs when I installed it. I asked it some questions, it did the research.

I then set it off generating the skeleton of a filter plugin, went to the shops to buy food, came back and worked through filling it in and finishing it off. There was a bug. It found the solution.

It's only about 100 lines of code but it is a random old webapp and it had to look stuff up to finish it, and I think it did rather well. All on my Mac.

I am deeply cynical of the one-shot code, "nobody codes anymore" hype culture idea and that distaste put me off AI and agentic coding for ages. Like you, I want an assistant but as a freelancer I have to stay in control. I have no interest in the "just specify loops" BS and it will be bad for my business anyway.

I worry about code that I don't have a good working overivew of, and I worry that I might forget what I have done (I have pretty bad issues with focus and memory). But in this particular case, I don't really care if I forget, because there's documented code and I have no intention of specialising in this app. So it was a nice little test case.

I also don't really want to sit around waiting for Qwen 3.8 27B on this machine. Muse Glimmer is fine, actually. Gets to the solution as quickly as Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B.

This gives me a little hope that local AI will give me the sort of responsive developer sidekick I actually want.