Deep Research has become its own category of software, not just a model pointed at a search box. This article compares twelve self-hosted systems and the research architectures behind them.

In September 2026 the open-model efficient frontier sits between 25B and 34B parameters: near-frontier agentic work on one 24 GB GPU, at a fraction of 70B-class hardware.

Persistent memory turns an agent from a re-explained tool into one that carries context forward — but it opens a failure mode stateless chat avoids: an interpretation can become memory, retrieved as fact, and justify a stronger version of itself.

Mnemosyne is a local-first memory provider for Hermes Agent, storing working memory, structured facts, temporal data, and episodic history in local SQLite — no hosted service, no mandatory network calls, and unusually granular write control.

An agent that proposed “move persistence into a shared library” six months ago will happily propose it again unless something durable says it was already rejected – and OpenSpec has no built-in state for that today.

OpenSpec is a free, open-source CLI from Fission AI that gets you and your coding agent to agree on a change in plain Markdown before any code gets written, without the phase-gated ceremony of heavier spec-driven frameworks.

Migrating an AI assistant is not the same as copying an application config. The hard part is preserving identity, memory, tool behavior, scheduled work, and messaging access without two gateways acting as the same bot.

Ollama and llama.cpp are often compared as if they were rival inference engines. The real choice is between a managed model service and a toolkit you operate directly.

ROCm and Vulkan both accelerate AMD GPUs for local LLM hosting, but they are not interchangeable. The right choice depends on the engine, GPU, and workload.

A model can advertise a 128K context window and still fail at 40K tokens on a 16 GB GPU. The architecture ceiling never promised that weights, KV cache, compute buffers, and the desktop compositor would fit on your card at the same time.

AI hype follows a rhythm: roughly every three years, the architecture everyone is betting on gets replaced by something newer. The next shift is already forming in research labs.

Agent Skills and MCP servers are often presented as competing ways to extend an AI agent. That framing is wrong: a skill teaches the agent how to work, while an MCP server gives it governed access to live capabilities.

OpenCode’s command-line interface is built for scripting, CI pipelines, and unattended agent runs. This article is a practical guide to using it in daily work.

Superpowers packages a full spec-driven methodology into installable Claude Skills, enforcing brainstorming, planning, subagent-driven implementation, and strict TDD instead of leaving that structure up to you.

Pi Coding Agent is a minimal, open-source terminal coding harness that ships with four default tools and leaves most of the behaviour to extensions, skills and your own workflow.

Markdown looks like one language until the same file renders differently on GitHub, Hugo, Obsidian, or Pandoc. And the problem is not that Markdown is unreliable.