Ran an experiment: 0.8B model teaching itself on a MacBook Air with 6GB RAM. Some findings that surprised me.

I've been messing around with getting tiny models to improve themselves locally. Wanted to share what I found because some of it caught me off guard. The setup is pretty simple. I took Qwen 3.5 0.8B (4-bit quantized), ran it on my MacBook Air M4, and gave it coding problems. It writes a solution, I run it against tests, and when it fails I show it the exact failure. Not just "wrong" but the actual input, what the answer should have been, and what it spit out. Then it tries again.