The AI coding landscape just changed! Poolside has officially released Laguna XS.2, a revolutionary 33B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, under the Apache 2.0 license. In this article, we dive deep into why this model is being called the 'Local Coding Beast' and how it stacks up against proprietary models like GPT-5 and Claude 4.7. We cover how you can download the weights from Hugging Face to run it locally on your own hardware (even with just 36GB of RAM!) and how to access it for FREE via OpenRouter. If you are looking for an agentic AI that can handle multi-step software engineering tasks without the heavy subscription costs, this is the model you've been waiting for.
What you will learn in this article:
- The technical architecture of the Laguna XS.2 MoE system.
- How to download and set up the model via Hugging Face and Ollama.
- Accessing the free API on OpenRouter for immediate testing.
- Performance benchmarks in agentic coding and bug fixing.