Imagine having a team of software engineers at your fingertips, working tirelessly to write code for you. While vibe coding has its detractors, a new local AI coding agent stack could revolutionize the way we develop software.
The stack consists of three main components: Goose, Ollama, and Qwen3-coder. Goose acts as the agent that plans, iterates, and applies changes. It’s like a project manager who understands intent, manages tasks, and decides what to ask the model to do next.
Ollama is the local runtime that hosts the model. Think of it as the database engine, extracting information from the large language model and making it available to other processes via a local API.
Qwen3-coder is the coding-focused LLM that generates results. It’s like a talented junior developer who writes code for you.
Together, these three components enable agentic coding, where a tool can help you do four years of product development in just four days. The impact is world-changing.
In my testing, I found that you can get a few hours of agentic coding done with the $20/month plans from the AI companies. However, if you’re going to put in full days of coding, you’ll need to upgrade to $100 or $200/month plans.
While both OpenAI and Anthropic have repeatedly said they respect the privacy of code bases, there’s an inherent security risk using cloud infrastructure. This new stack addresses these challenges by running locally on your machine.
The system is free, local, inspectable, and modular. You can swap out the Qwen3-coder LLM for another coding model without changing Goose. You can update or optimize Ollama without touching your workflows.
In summary, this local AI coding agent stack provides a lot of flexibility and control. It’s like having a software engineering department in a box, where you have Goose as the senior engineer guiding the session, Ollama as the infrastructure engineer managing your computing environment, and Qwen3-coder as the talented junior developer writing code.
What do you think about this approach? Would you try local, agent-based coding tools like Goose with Ollama and a downloadable coding model?
Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/local-ai-coding-stack-replaces-claude-code-codex-free