A Verge reviewer tries a fully local AI agent: useful for private tasks, still fiddly

The Verge's Antonio G. Di Benedetto, writing on 11 October 2026, describes running the free, open-source Hermes Agent with the 125-billion-parameter Qwen 3.8 Flash Next model entirely on an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, controlled from his phone through Telegram. Setup was quick. A daily briefing from his email, calendar and weather kept failing at first because the Mac went to sleep, and has broken several times since. What worked: sorting his 400-plus Steam games into categories in a few minutes using a temporary API key he revoked afterwards, crunching financial records, and building a laptop spec comparison he would not upload to a cloud service. Getting it to write benchmark automation scripts is still a work in progress. His view is that keeping sensitive data on his own computer is what made him willing to use AI at all.