[NBJack]

I'm afraid prompts and clever arrangements of data don't really negate the parent post warnings. It's great if it works for you and your projects. Unfortunately, I can almost guarantee your approach will break down once you get a project large enough or switch to a less popular language.

My favorite example is Godot; most local models just can't get it through their thick AI skull that code alone won't be enough to generate working solutions. They must accept a more complex harness, or you must provide much more info that eats the precious available context on every run.

[aka-rider]

There is no replacement for large models, indeed. And this is not the point I'm trying to make. There are numerous applications for self-hosted models.

As a simplest example, when you ask "explain what this code does" advantage of large models is negligible.

I tried Fable, "look at this repo, find all bugs" — yeah, neither Qwen nor Opus can do this.

> I can almost guarantee your approach will break down once you get a project large enough or switch to a less popular language.

I can guarantee you it is not, I used my Qwen on 10-15 years of PHP — I just know how and where it will break; what to ask for, what not. Orqestra was/is self-hosted, being developed by, well, orchestra of Qwen agents.

Moreover, Opus and GPT-5.5 break similarly, yeah they will withstand much more pressure, but they will hallucinate and loop nevertheless. My Qwen experience translates seamlessly. I learned so much about agentic engineering, harnesses, tooling, building custom MCPs...

[NBJack]

PHP is ancient in the current timeline of programming history. The Venn diagram of your code base and what it digested during training is basically a circle.