I built a coding agent that gets 87% on benchmarks with a 4B parameter model, here's how
r/LocalLLaMA
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Generative AI
Open Source AI
AI Research
I was frustrated that every coding agent (OpenCode, Cursor, Claude Code) assumes you're running GPT-5.4 or Claude Opus. If you try them with a local model like Gemma or Qwen they fall apart. I find that often tool calls fail, context overflows, multi-step tasks collapse. So I built SmallCode. It's designed from the ground up for small local models. The result: 87/100 benchmark tasks pass with a Gemma 4 model that only activates 4B parameters per token. OpenCode scores ~75% with 14B models. The harness does the heavy lifting, not the model size.