The main problem with the coding front ends is their lack of good knowledge of anything that's not modern, and they will tend to make stuff up to avoid doing a lot of work to find out how to do it all.
That's why people are really excited with Open Claw / Hermes Agent / Nanobot, etc... They are designed to spend extra time learning, rather than just relying on how they were trained. Codex is one of the LLM backends for these agents. I usually add something into the SOUL.md files about not trusting their own training over what references are available in the files available. The bot I created deliberately made skills to follow design patters particular to the platform. Removing the assumptions means less hallucinations. Regards, Marcus B On Fri, 17 Apr 2026, at 05:03, George M. Rimakis wrote: > $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
