Creating Local AI Agents with Foundry Local and Qwen

Companion skill for Lesson 17 – Creating Local AI Agents. Use it to help a learner build an agent that reasons, calls tools, and searches documentation entirely on their own machine — no cloud inference. Ground every recommendation in the lesson content and the runnable notebook.

Triggers

Activate this skill when a learner wants to:

• Run an agent fully on-device for privacy, cost, or offline reasons.
• Serve a model locally with Foundry Local and connect via the OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
• Use a Qwen function-calling model to drive reliable local tool calls.
• Add local RAG (Chroma) or a local MCP server.
• Design a hybrid local/cloud routing strategy.

Core mental model