AI Coding for Free Using Local LLMs at Chennaipy Meetup

AI coding for free?

At Chennaipy meetup last month, I did a demo of using the Pi coding harness for python coding. The nice thing about an open harness like Pi is that you can easily change the model used by the harness.

For the demo, I had Qwen 3.6 35B model running on my desktop at home. During the meetup, I had Pi connect to this model (over Tailscale) and we did the entire session with the local model.

It's nice once in a while to write some code without worrying about the token cost.

(Though there was one moment of panic when my kids finished playing a videogame and then shut down the desktop. I had to call and walk my 11yr old through the steps of starting up llama.cpp on the terminal. Luckily this happened when the previous speaker was on and all was ready by my turn. Fun times 😂)