Yeah, I have a lot of problems with the idea of handing our ability to write code over to a few big Silicon Valley companies, and also have privacy concerns, environmental concerns, etc, so I've refused to touch any agentic coding until I could run open weights models locally.

I'm still not sold on the idea, but this allows me to experiment with it fully locally, without paying rent to some companies I find quite questionable, and I can know exactly how much power I'm drawing and the money is already spent, I'm not spendding hundreds a month on a subscription.

And yes, the Strix Halo isn't the only way to run models locally for a relatively affordable price; it's just the one I happened to pick, mostly because I already needed a new laptop, and that 128 GiB of unified RAM is pretty nice even when I'm not using most of it for a model.