[scottyeager]

Personally I found the mini SWE-agent to be a very approachable introduction to building agents: https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent

There are a number of free and cheap LLM options to experiment with. Google offers a decent free plan for Gemini (get some extra Google accounts). Groq has a free tier including some good open weight models. There's also free endpoints on OpenRouter that are limited but might be useful for long running background agents. DeepSeek v3.2, Qwen3, Kimi K2, and GLM 4.6 are all good choices for cheap and capable models.

Local models are generally not a shortcut to cheap and effective AI. It's a fun thing to explore though.