Running a local coding agent on a Mac Mini
By Vilius Vystartas
I have an agent that does my low-stakes coding. File edits, test fixes, build verification. The kind of work you'd normally do yourself but it's faster to delegate. It also writes Playwright tests, reviews code, updates documentation, and runs deploys.
It runs locally — Mac Mini M4, 24 GB. No cloud API calls for the coding part. The orchestration layer still uses a cheap cloud model for planning and routing. The actual file editing is done by Pi, a coding agent that connects to oMLX, an OpenAI-compatible local LLM server.
The same setup can drive Claude Code, Codex, or any coding agent that speaks OpenAI-compatible API. Pi is what I use, but the oMLX server works with anything.
All the model names, config files, and paths are inside the script at the bottom.
I keep two and swap depending on the task. The 24 GB can't hold both at once.
One as good as I can have on this machine — 9B class, ~20 tok/s. Primary coding model.
Another fast — 4B class, ~27 tok/s. File edits, quick fixes, daily tasks.
The swap script moves one out, brings the other in, restarts the server. Takes about 5 seconds.
Anything more complex than a one-liner goes through RPC mode. The orchestration layer writes a prompt, Pi executes, the result comes back. No tmux, no process wrangling.
curl -fsSL https://workswithagents.dev/static/setup-local-llm-pi.sh | sh