alt Hacker NewsI run an personal AI agent locally (hermes), and use a combination of local models and whatever model I can get for a reasonable price (usually deepseek). After using it for a couple months, I'm converted. They're so good, the more you use it, the more useful it is; you internalise more of what it could be used for. It runs so many boring parts of my life, leaving me with more time to spend with my family. I liken it to release of the first iPhone; it didn't invent any new technology, but packaged different bits of tech together in a way that was consumer friendly. I think we'll look back at OpenClaw/Hermes/Muse/Instinct in the same way. I do worry about using purely cloud based offerings like Muse, I reckon there is a market for someone to package an consumer AI agent that lives on your home network.
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Can you give some ideas of what you use it for? I'm amenable to the idea of automating some things I just don't know what I'm missing. Or using it for things I never thought of before.
ok but what are the legitimate use cases you have for this? We were promised something similar with Google Home et al but they are glorified light switches and timers in my home. I run a homelab, I have technical ambitions, but I cannot think of a single thing in my life that I would rather talk to a local AI about than just do it myself or sit down and prompt Claude manually for.
How are you combining local models with hosted models? I have tried OpenClaw with some of the smaller local models (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next) and found that while it can sometimes complete tasks, it would face plant often enough that it made it impossible to use. Do you have some tiered system where the hosted models dispatch to local models?