Personally, I'm using side projects to test what a basic agentic setup can achieve, i.e. not paying for anything but the electricity bill. Reaching that state is the real side project.

(I've not landed on a good solution yet, ollama+opencode kinda works but there are often problems with parsing output and abrupt terminations - I'm sure some of it is the models, some the config, some my pitiful rtx 5090 16gb, and some are just bugs...)