Coding agents on 8GB VRAM: little-coder vs barebones just Pi for small models

Botoni · reddit · 2026-09-07

A developer running Hermes as a coding-agent harness finds its context footprint too heavy for a laptop with an 8GB NVIDIA GPU and 40GB RAM, and is weighing lighter options for models like qwen3.6 35b-a3b.

Candidates: little-coder (and smallcoder), which promise a small context and Pi-based extensions tailored for small models, versus just running barebones just Pi with its minimal system prompt and tools. The post asks for community tests and experience on whether the tailored extensions justify the overhead.

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