mini-swe-agent

> it shows that even if models are plateauing, The models aren't plateauing (see below). > invention of MCP was a lot more instrumental [...] than model upgrades proper Not clear. The folks at hf showed that a minimal "agentic loop" in 100 LoC [1] that gives the agent "just bash access" still got very close to SotA with all the bells and whistles (and surpassed last year models w/ handcrafted harnesses). [1] - https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent

Personally I found the mini SWE-agent to be a very approachable introduction to building agents: https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent There are a number of free and cheap LLM options to experiment with. Google offers a decent free plan for Gemini (get some extra Google accounts). Groq has a free tier including some good open weight models. There's also free endpoints on OpenRouter that are limited but might be useful for long running background agents. DeepSeek v3.2, Qwen3, Kimi K2, and GLM 4.6 are all good choices for cheap and capable models. Local models are generally not a shortcut to cheap and effective AI. It's a fun thing to explore though.