Local Agent Bakeoff: Granite 4.2 Is the New Homelab King, But Turn Thinking Off to Speed It Up 10x
·11 min read
Three new contestants join the local agent bakeoff: IBM Granite 4.2, Poolside Laguna XS 2.1, and DeepReinforce Ornith 1.5. Granite 4.2 unseats Qwen 3.6 as the equal-weighted leader and dominates the one job that actually matters, Home Assistant tool-calling. Then a fourth run isolates a single variable, IBM’s default-on thinking mode, and finds it costs 10.8x the wall-clock time for no measurable accuracy gain on this battery. Plus: why the coding domain needs a harder replacement before round three.