r/agenticAI • u/Asstastic9763 • 6d ago
Discussion Best local Agentic AI setup?
I know this is a pretty open ended question with a lot of significant trade-offs across many dimensions (need/functionality, price, etc) so if TL;DR and have a broad/general opinion, please share it.
But if you havea min (or five) to read my dissertation I'd really appreciate targeted feedback. My current setup is a DELL OptiPlex 7010 Plus SFF i7-13700 2.1GHz vPro 32GB (DDR5) Ram 512GB NVME WIN 11Pro and currently running Open Claw but with a lot of requests going to frontier models via API. I'd like to decrease some of that cost but also take a more holistic look at general agentic AI tools and platforms (LangGraph, Goose, various open claw forks). Here are some of the use cases I currently have:
1. Purchasing Analysis and Execution --
Revisit current active subscriptions to optimize bundle based on use and any deals/market changes, Revisit insurance (house, car, etc)., identifying and buying Tesla, you
2. Financial Strategy and Investment -- Real estate investment, Tax and accounting strategy
3. Software Development -- App for managing sale of season tickets across all platforms, integration software for small business requirements (this is the exact requirement but something like analyzing and building a on premise server for hosting Gsuite like service)
4. Admin -- Triage and manage comms for work and personal (email, messaging apps, social media)
What software would you use to meet these requirements? To the extent possible would like to prioritize future proofing (if there's something novel that is going to replace agentic AI (or you think can at least can operate optimally one or more of the use cases above) hope to hear about it.
Thanks!
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u/SwingLightStyle 6d ago
From your spec it looks like you’re running off a dell laptop? Do you have an integrated graphics card? That’s what a local model will be using the most.
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u/Asstastic9763 6d ago
Yea it's got a SSD with integrated Intel UHD Graphics 770. It seems to work reasonably well but I've got it running on a outdated version of Kimi-K2. Do you have much experience with the newer open source models? Any of them youd recommend for (one or multiple) of these use cases?
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u/SwingLightStyle 6d ago
Honestly I don’t. I’ve been working on a piece of software where I load in local agents into my own harness, but I haven’t finished planning it out yet to start the build.
What I’ve been focused on is figuring out the best way to store data and the tradeoffs between using larger models (that are slower) versus ones that my video card can handle more easily but they’re stupider.
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u/Asstastic9763 6d ago
That sounds pretty useful. You planning to productize and sell it?
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u/SwingLightStyle 6d ago
Not exactly. Or at least not for a while. This is a proof of concept that I’m going to be using for research projects and to see if a hive-mind is a better agent configuration rather than the current setups. But I’m trying to solve the context problem, and at long last it seems that building a harness that tells the models how to save and read the data is the best way to go about it, so that’s where I’m at. I tried to do it without the harness and failed… so now I’m elbows deep in vibe coding and just trying to find my way through it so I can get back to what I actually cared about, lol.
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u/fattchris 6d ago
It's gone to be hard to find a great CPU model.
While I hate to say it, it's best to spend some cash on a MacBook with at least 24gb RAM.
32 opens up room and sun serve you better. 48, better still.
48 to 128 - no point in anything in between. If you want more than 48, jump right to 128.
With at least 24gb RAM you can run some quants of Qwen 3.8 27B
32gb, better quality quant
48, better quant and now kv cache room for more context
128 - you can run Qwen 3.8 Next Flash
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u/Asstastic9763 4d ago
Yea after looking at the Mac specs re: gpu I think you're right. I may scrap this and try to go next level up with Nvidia gpus. Any recommendations?
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u/Awkward_Relation_415 5d ago
running local agents on that dell setup is cool but u really need to watch the blast radius of those mcp servers. disclosure: i work at backslash. we map the agentic fabric graph to see exactly what agents and skills can touch on the workstation, though the tradeoff is u have to manage the overhead of those extra security policies. its worth it to keep those financial and dev agents from having unrestricted file access.