A local coding agent on Pi
Operate — backup scope after the original "replace Claude Code" framing was revised down to partial coverage.
There's a local coding harness running on a Raspberry Pi on my desk. It uses my own Smith specs and locked behaviors, routes harder tasks through a voice-tier router, and shells out to bash and the editor like any agentic coding tool. A small thing. It exists because Claude Code is excellent — and because excellence sourced entirely from one provider is a position of weakness.
The intelligence layer
Ollama on the heavy tier runs qwen3:27b for most coding tasks. The voice-tier router escalates to Kimi K2.6 cloud when the context calls for it. That part is solved.
The interesting part is the harness — the program that uses that intelligence the way Claude Code uses Anthropic's API. The harness reads my locked behaviors, follows my Smith specs, and exits cleanly when something is outside the locked scope. Deliberately minimal, developer in command, behavior on rails.
- Refactors and rewrites where the change is well-scoped.
- Reviewing code against a spec.
- Scaffolds where the patterns are already established.
- Long-context multi-file work — still goes to Claude Code or escalates to cloud-backup.
- Open-ended planning across an unfamiliar codebase.
How it relates to Claude Code
Both tools live in the daily routine; neither replaces the other. Claude Code handles the heavy multi-file work and the planning sessions. The Pi handles the local, well-scoped, behavior-locked work — and it answers a different question entirely: whether I can keep building if a vendor's pricing changes, a model retires, or the policy on a tool shifts.
Sovereignty is the second answer, even when the first answer is "Claude Code is faster today."
The original framing was that the Pi would replace Claude Code. The framing shifted. The Pi is a backup — partial cost reduction on the work it handles well, full autonomy upside across the whole stack. That trade reads better in practice than the all-or-nothing version did on paper.