I am running local offline small models in the old fashioned REPL style, without any agentic features. One prompt at a time.

Instead of asking for answers, I ask for specific files to read or specific command line tools with specific options. I pipe the results to a file and then load it into the CLI session. Then I turn these commands into my own scripts and documentation (in Makefile).

I forbid the model wandering around to give me tons of irrelevant markdown text or generated scripts.

I ask straight questions and look for straight answers. One line at a time, one file at a time.

This gives me plenty of room to think what I want and how I get what I want.

Learning what we want and what we need to do to achieve it is the precious learning experience that we don’t want to offload to the machine.