Mid-research on the LocalAI bakeoff, I got asked a blunt question: why not just run Coder Agents as the homelab supervisor too? The answer split my original coding-vs-general-purpose hypothesis into a sharper dichotomy — ephemeral/invoke-driven/git-centric vs. persistent/event-driven/tool-centric — and pointed straight at Turnstone as the next thing worth a real bakeoff.
Two Discord bots, one 14B model, five fitness-tracker tasks. Both agents failed on the first try. Getting them working required debugging context overflow, silent tool parameter drops, and a chat template flag that changes everything. The results reveal as much about the state of local AI agents as they do about which framework won.
Two weeks of using Qwen3.5-35B as my daily AI assistant — the Jinja template fix that made it work, the thermal spam incident that almost ended the experiment, and the session-context gap that makes it feel like a junior dev every morning. Plus: what's next with Qwen 3.6.