Home | Nathan Callender

Beyond Vibe Coding: Structured Agentic Coding with Local Models
October 18, 2026 • engineering, local-ai, agentic-coding, vibe-coding, opencode
Vibe coding has gotten a bad reputation in the industry, and I think we all know why by now. No one actually loves working on...
Swift 1.5 27B and Mellum 2.1 12B: Local AI Coding Models
October 13, 2026 • engineering, local-ai, agentic-coding, qwen, mellum, jetbrains
It’s amazing how quickly the local agentic arena has changed this year. There are rumors that Qwen 4 will come out soon, and lots of...
2026 September Image Classification, Local AI, and Agentic Coding
September 19, 2026 • engineering, image-classification, image-captioning, computer-vision, local-ai, agentic-coding, opencode, qwen
It has been about a month and I have fallen hard into my little image-captioning test project as a way to experiment with local agentic...
Getting Ready for Fall Bird Migration
August 23, 2026 • nature, wildlife, birds, backyard
Earlier in the spring I found myself searching endlessly for things like “how do you find wildlife in the Chicago area?” or “Is there any...
Summertime in the Garden
August 15, 2026 • nature, flowers, garden, adventure
It is hard to believe that summer is already winding down - at least from an academic year standpoint. It was a fun-filled summer for...
2026 August Qwen 3.8 27B - Local AI Agentic Coding on Consumer Hardware
August 15, 2026 • engineering, qwen, local-ai, agentic-coding, llama.cpp, consumer-hardware
The Qwen team tried to raise the bar one more time with a little August surprise release of the Qwen 3.8 27B open weight model...
2026 Local AI Mid-Year Check-In
July 18, 2026 • engineering, local-ai
I have been using AI for coding and technical work for several years now, and being an engineer, there is no escaping the impact the...
Oregon and The Redwoods
July 04, 2026 • nature, travel, adventure
Our family travelled out to Oregon this summer to visit family, and as always Oregon was beautiful! I usually bring a camera but the these...
Elk and More at Busse Woods
June 20, 2026 • wildlife, nature, local
Elk Grove Village is home to a fair number of little areas that have wildlife in the suburbs, but Busse Woods is one of my...
Spring Flora Around Chicago
June 16, 2026 • nature, flowers, adventure
I don’t usually seek out flowers when I’m spending time outside. Usually, I’m looking for some wildlife and flowers catch my eye, or I strike...

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