u/No-Purchase8133

I spent the last few days trying to turn a Jetson into a small local AI machine.

The original goal was pretty vague: get a local model running, see what the Jetson could actually handle, and maybe build a simple agent around it if I got that far.

Naturally, the first few hours were not spent doing any of that.

I was stuck debugging weird Jetson issues that didn’t match the docs. Missing files, wrong power mode options, random setup behavior that made no sense. Eventually I realized I had somehow flashed the wrong Jetson Developer Kit image onto the microSD card.

No idea how I did that. I’m sure it was user error, but I’m choosing not to investigate my own crimes too deeply.

Then I found a way to connect the Jetson directly to a AI platform then AI just helped fix that.

AI also helped me set up VNC so I could stop dragging a monitor over every time I wanted to check something. That was a small thing, but it made the Jetson feel way less annoying to use. Before that, every tiny change felt like I was doing surgery on a shoebox.

Then I used AI to build a basic dashboard to watch CPU/GPU state in real time. Mostly because I wanted to know when the Jetson was actually working hard versus when I was just waiting for no reason.

After that came the part I originally wanted to do: getting Qwen3.5-9B-Q4_K_M running locally.

That took the usual amount of searching, compiling, trying something, breaking something, reading one more GitHub issue, realizing I missed a flag, and then pretending I knew that flag mattered all along.

Once the model was running, I started building a small agent around it. Nothing magical. Just something that could run locally, look at its own behavior, notice when it failed or gave weak outputs, and make small changes to improve its own code/instructions.

Still very rough. Still lots to clean up. But it worked enough to make the idea feel real.