Developers Shift Toward Local-First AI Agents

Senior developers report in early 2026 that high-velocity code generation is creating technical debt, prompting a shift from simple autocompletion to local-first AI coding agents that offer transparency, governance, and data sovereignty. The guide evaluates open-source and commercial agents (Cline, Aider, Roo Code, etc.), recommends BYOK with frontier models like GLM-4.5 to cut costs by about 90%, and emphasizes verification loops and sandboxed execution.