This site reliability engineer works mainly on Dynatrace and used local Qwen 3.6 and 3.8 to build many custom apps inside it, including a theming engine for the dashboards. The more interesting technique is how they keep a small model useful on a large codebase: they feed it whole repositories and ask it to summarise each one into a manifest describing what the code does and how it fits the wider app. The model can then read that short manifest and jump only to the files it needs to edit, instead of loading the entire codebase.
Their advice is to treat a local model as an unlimited, iterable workhorse rather than comparing it with frontier models, and to have it write or update a handoff file every turn so work can move cleanly between conversations.
Reported anonymously by an r/LocalLLM contributor · score 1