Building local agents that don't fall apart
Design agent loops that work with 7 to 14B models: error compounding maths, state and context budgeting, a complete loop with schema-constrained actions, guardrails, loop detection and how to evaluate success rates.
14 min·Verified 2026-11Pro+50 XP
An agent is a loop: observe, decide, act, repeat until the goal is met or a limit is hit. With frontier hosted models, loosely designed agents often work. With 7 to 14B local models they do not, unless you design around their weaknesses. The good news is that the design that works for small models also produces agents that are cheaper, faster and easier to debug.
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