I have two 128 GB unified-memory machines on my desk. Day job gear, not mine. One is an ASUS Ascent GX10 — an NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell appliance half the size of a hardback book. The other is an HP ZBook Ultra G1a, a 14" mobile workstation running AMD’s Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 (“Strix Halo”). Both hold an 80B coding model entirely in memory. How do they compare for agentic coding?
I’ve been dorking around with local AI coding agents for a while now. At some point curiosity got the better of me and I had to know: what the heck are these things actually doing under the hood?
There’s no way to really understand something unless you dive into first principles. This is especially true for AI coding agents. What is the editor doing under the hood? I try to peel the onion a bit.