I Built a Local-First Agent Runtime in Rust (and Why Wrapping Existing CLIs Didn’t Work)

I’ve been trying to make local AI workflows reliable for real day-to-day use: coding tasks, browser tasks, repeatable evals, and auditable tool execution. I first tried adding trust/approval controls around existing agent CLIs. That approach hit a hard limit quickly: when tool execution is deeply native to the host app, external wrappers can’t reliably enforce policy boundaries. So I built my own runtime: LocalAgent . GitHub: https://github.com/CalvinSturm/LocalAgent Why I built this I kept seeing the same failure pattern with local 20–30B models: brittle tool behavior occasional non-answers inconsistent step execution hard-to-debug failures without replayable state The answer wasn’t just “pick a better model.” The answer was to harden the runtime process: explicit safety gates deterministic artifacts policy + approvals eval + baseline comparisons replay + verification What LocalAgent is LocalAgent is a local-first agent runtime CLI focused on control and reliability. It supports: loca