When the connection drops
One signal so far this week, with more to come before Thursday. A principal engineer got a coding agent to fix a bug on a laptop with the Wi-Fi off, using a 9B open-weight model. If you own the whole stack, you own the toolchain too, including what happens when the connection drops. One small bug is thin evidence, so I'm treating it as a prompt to test my own setup, not a conclusion.
- Open source and local models01
A 9B model on a laptop fixed a bug with the Wi-Fi off
What happenedRittika Jindal, a principal engineer at Thomson Reuters, published a test on Latent Space on October 27. She ran a coding agent with no network at all. The agent was OpenCode 1.19.4, the model was Qwen3.5 9B served locally through Ollama (about a 7 GB download, 64k context), and the machine was a Mac laptop. The task was a small Python project whose expense total printed 8.00 instead of 25.50, with three of five tests failing. The model proposed a one-line fix, the agent asked permission before editing, and she re-ran the tests herself. All five passed. She confirmed that localhost worked and an outside request failed. She tested from a remote home in the Himalayan foothills, where outages are common.
Why it mattersJindal wrote it because her power and internet drop out, and she wanted to know if her agent still works when they do. That question applies to anyone who owns a whole stack alone, and it's cheap to answer. The limits are real. It was one small bug, and a one-line fix shows the setup works.
What to do nextTry it once on something small while you're online, then repeat it with Wi-Fi off. Download the model and your project's test tools first, and name the exact test command in your prompt. Her agent reached for pytest on a unittest project. Keep permission prompts on and web tools blocked, and check your RAM, because download size isn't the same as memory needed.