Month 8 of building ATLAS: pushing a local small model toward frontier coding ability on a gaming PC

itigges22 · reddit · 2026-09-18

An 8-month solo research project called ATLAS attempts to close the gap between a small local model and frontier intelligence—without touching weights—by engineering the system around it, starting with code where compilation, tests, and execution feedback give verifiable signal.

V1 (Jan 2026): llama.cpp quantized local inference, RAG over the repo (embeddings + Qdrant) to compensate for small context, sandboxed execution with retries and per-attempt temperature tuning, plus a Redis/workers/K3s task queue and deployment stack.

V2 (Feb 2026): Best-of-K candidate generation with diversity-aware selection, and the "Geometric Lens"—a small neural net trained on code embeddings and execution pass/fail labels producing a scalar cost field C(x) to rank candidates (post truncates here).

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Month 8 of building ATLAS: pushing a local small model toward frontier coding ability on a gaming PC

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