I needed a small script to help anonymizing some test data. Nothing fancy, but on my way to ChatGPT I ended up on the “wrong window” — and threw the prompt at Olamma gpt-oss instead. And it surprised me by giving me a solid result quickly. Small local models are the future and being able to run them on hardware you already own is a political statement.
No remote API calls. No burning through tokens/the environment. No company watching. Like a cowboy, just me and my machine.Small, local models that are good enough to be useful and powerful enough to matter.
Mostly, just worked
I ended up trying the prompt with a couple of different models, and then grading the results.
i need a script that will give me at least 1042 distinct but made up show names. they should be funny and grammatically correct and written in typescript
I expected gpt-oss:20b to be the best of the lot, but surprisingly the 5 month old llama3.2 crushed everything on the time dimension:
4 of them got winning results on the first (and only) try:
Code “Quality”
This is silly since it’s a tiny, throw away script but:
| Model | AI Quality | Docker Execution | Notes / Errors |
|---|---|---|---|
| gpt-oss:20b | 4/5 | ✅ Success | Clear & well-named; could abstract title generation. |
| deepseek-r1:32b | 3/5 | ✅ Success | Repeats random-selection logic, refactoring needed. |
| devstral:24b | 4/5 | ✅ Success | Cleanly organized, avoid duplicate checks. |
| llama3.2:latest | 4/5 | ✅ Success | Clear, but unused suffixes array and weak modularity. |
| gemma3:12b | 4/5 | ❌ Failed | TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (forEach) |
| gemma3:27b | 3/5 | ❌ Failed | ReferenceError: $2 is not defined |
| mistral-small3.2:24b | 3/5 | ❌ Failed | Syntax error: Expected ”)” but found “count” |
This is for TypeScript, they could be better or worse on different languages.
The test code is on github
Will Schenk August 20, 2025
