Hands on with local AI: Hermes Agent and Qwen on a Mac Studio
A Verge reviewer installed the open-source Hermes Agent desktop app on an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB of unified memory and chose the roughly 105GB, 125-billion-parameter Qwen 3.8 Flash Next model to run locally. He used it to build a daily briefing, sort a Steam library of more than 400 games by genre, analyze financial records and make a laptop spec-comparison spreadsheet, and is now trying to script partial automation of laptop benchmark testing. The author says local models are no magic assistant — tasks still break — but the privacy of keeping data on the machine makes him more willing to trust it with sensitive work.
Locally run open-source agents can handle privacy-sensitive tasks without sending data to the cloud, but the rough edges show local AI still sits between demo and everyday tool.