$20/mo will buy you a ChatGPT subscription which I think is more than adequate for any M100 project.
The size of whatever project you are working on, by virtue of it being designed for a small system, will fit in the models context window. Plus whatever other context you need to provide. Maybe you can fine tune Gemma 4 or something to run locally, but I’m pretty sure it will cost you much more than $20 a month, and won’t be as good as Codex. But honestly if you want to do it just to do it, that’s a totally different story :D There isn’t a ton of practicality in tinkering with these old machines anyway, just for fun. -George On Thu, Apr 16, 2026 at 9:57 AM Marcus B <[email protected]> wrote: > Well, that's a coincidence with a recent project I've been working on... > > I've recently been playing with hermes agent on a Raspberry Pi, and a $20 > Ollama subscription. > > The intention was to create a Picomite/Picocalc MMBASIC programming > expert. I first got it to consume the Picomite manual, and put it into a > wiki, that had pages small enough to not overwhelm its context window. Next > step was asking it to review the whole structure, and identify design > patterns and programming techniques and to document them in the wiki it > created. At this stage I also got it to create its own skills for > programming, and for the design patterns. > > I then grabbed about 125 Picocalc BASIC programs from github, and then > asked the agent to do the same again, design patterns and techniques; but > also add code examples to the wiki. At all steps, reminding it that it was > the consumer of the documentation, and to format it for itself. > > The outcome was about 117 files and 28 skills. I have not asked it to > write code yet, but I'm pretty confident it'd create something mostly sane. > That all used less than 5% of my weekly allowance for tokens (< $1). > > I've attached an example of one of the pages it created. My guess is it > hasn't extensively expanded the manual into its own documentation, but as > hermes is designed to learn, it can expand on what it has. > > On a side note, this is one of about 5 agents I've created. One is doing a > great job of managing my calendar and tasks, and sending me the latest news > and weather every morning. All created by just asking it to do it for me in > mostly plain language. > > Regards, > Marcus B > > > On Thu, 16 Apr 2026, at 10:02, Kenneth Pettit wrote: > > On 4/15/26 3:14 PM, [email protected] wrote: > >> On Wed, 15 Apr 2026, Joshua O'Keefe wrote: > >> > >>>> On Apr 14, 2026, at 10:39 AM, John R. Hogerhuis <[email protected]> > >>>> wrote: > >>>> > >>>> Anyone interested in collaborating on that? Ideally someone who has > >>>> created a local model so we don't get stuck spinning our wheels. > >>>> > >>> > >>> Hi John. Reach out, LLMs are an area I've done and am doing work. I'd > >>> love to talk. > >> > >> If you guys stand up a dedicated LLM for our community, it would be a > >> monster help. I would be hella willing to donate funds to the cause. > >> It would definitely help with my PC-2 project (which is a monster > >> effort) as well as my back-burner M100 project (also a monster effort). > >> > >> I'm not rich, just saying > > > > Hmm, I *did* buy a loaded Macbook Pro (think 128GB Unified memory) three > > months ago. Maybe it is time to put all that memory to good use > > training an LLM for Model100 programming!. :) I bought the extra RAM > > for that very thing but just haven't had time yet. > > > > Ken
