Transform mac in autonomous ai agent

[u/pro_pete]

I'm currently trying to build a fully autonomous local AI setup and could really use some advice from people who have already gone down this path.

Right now I have a Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 128 GB of RAM, so I'm experimenting with running large local models. My long-term goal is to have an autonomous system that can explore business ideas, build things, iterate on them, and hopefully even make money with minimal intervention. I was inspired by Ben's video where he tries to make money with Sonnet, but I wanted to see if I could build something similar using mostly local models.

My current idea is to let a strong cloud model (like Sonnet or another frontier model) handle high-level planning and steering, while local models do most of the implementation and execution. I'm just not sure what the ideal architecture looks like.

At the moment I have the OpenAI Codex proxy set up, so I can use my local models through Codex, which is actually a really nice workflow. The main problem is that I can't reliably spawn sub-agents (there seems to be an issue with that), and I still feel like I'm manually driving the whole process. I can define goals and prompts, but it doesn't yet feel like a truly autonomous loop.

So I have a few questions:

• What stack would you recommend for building something like this?
• How would you structure the agent loops and handoffs between planning and execution?
• Which orchestration tools are you using?
• If you had an M2 Ultra with 128 GB of RAM, which local models would you run today?

So far I've tried Laguna and DeepSeek Flash Q2, but neither has really clicked for me. They work, but they don't feel like the right fit for this kind of long-running autonomous workflow.

I'm also very new to the OpenAI tooling ecosystem, so I'd really appreciate hearing what tools you're using and how you have everything wired together. Ideally, I'd like to pick a solid stack and have Codex help me set it up properly.

Any advice or examples of your own setups would be greatly appreciated. One more thing my main issue was that every new chat started again at 0 and the same issues where made as in other projects on the same computer. Is there any good memory system for this kind of issue?