Days since last GitHub incident

I've gotten accustomed lately to spending a lot of time in the Github Copilot / agent management page. In particular I've been having a lot of fun using agents to browse some of my decade-old throwaway projects; telling it to "setup playwright, write some tests, record screenshots/videos and commit them to the repo" works every time and it's a great way to browse memory lane without spending my own time getting some of these projects building and running again.

However this means I'm now using the Github website and services 1000x more than I was previously, and they're trending towards having coin-flip uptime stats.

If Github sold a $5000 box I could plug into a corner in my house and just use that entire experience locally I'd seriously consider it. I'm guessing maybe I could get partway there by spending twice that on a Mac Pro but I have no idea what the software stack would look like today.

Is there a fully local equivalent out-of-the-box experience that anyone can vouch for? I've used local agents primarily through VSCode, but AFAIK that's limited to running a single active agent over your repo, and obviously limited by the constraints of running on a single M1 laptop I currently use. I know at least some people are managing local fleets of agents in some manner, but I really like how immensely easy Github has made it.

An NVIDIA DGX Spark is $4000, pair that with a relatively cheap second box to run GitLab in the corner and you would have pretty good local AI inference setup. (you'd probably have to write a nontrivial amount of software to get your setup where you want)

The local models are just right on the edge of being really useful, there's a tipping point to where accuracy is high enough so that getting things done is easy vs models getting continuously stuck. We're in the neighborhood.

Alternatively, just have local GitLab and use one of the many APIs, those are much more stable than github. Honestly just get yourself a Claude subscription.

I can't say I'm not tempted looking at the Spark, I could probably save some cash on heating my house with that thing. Though yeah unless there's some good software already built around a similar LLM workflow I could use it'd probably be wasted on me, or spend its time desperately trying to pay for itself with crypto mining.

Adding Claude to my rotation is starting to look like the option with the least amount of building the universe from scratch. I have to imagine it can be used in a similar or identical workflow to the Copilot one where it can create PRs and make adjustments in response to feedback etc.

>Though yeah unless there's some good software already built around a similar LLM workflow I could use it'd probably be wasted on me, or spend its time desperately trying to pay for itself with crypto mining.

A big part of my success using LLMs to build software is building the tools to use LLMs and the LLMs making that tool building easy (and possible).

I tried this for a little while and couldn't really get passionate about it; I have too many other backlogged projects that I was eager to tear into with LLMs and I got impatient. That was a while ago though and the ROI for building my own tools has probably gotten a lot more attractive.

I started building my own tool set because I was doing too many projects with LLMs and getting frustrated by a very real need for organization and tooling to get repetitive meaningless tasks out of the way and to get all of my projects organized so I could see what was going on.