Are small local models for automation a thing?

I’ve been following this sub for a while, and it feels like the massive hype is always around having a local vibe coding assistant or trying to run heavy, near-frontier models locally, and that’s amazing.

But I feel like we are overlooking a massive use case, for me, an important part of local LLMs is automation.

I’m talking about using small, efficient models (like 1B to 4B parameters) embedded directly into scripts to handle tasks that were previously impossible.

I genuinely believe a huge part of the future of AI lies in these lightweight models.

However, I rarely see posts about this kind of practical, script-level automation here.

It’s usually all about coding assistants, or hardware flexing.

Is there another subreddit more focused on local LLM automations, scripting, and pipelines?

Or is there just a general lack of interest in these ultra-small, task-specific models here?

I feel like in the near future, there will be scripts for everything, automating away all those tedious, repetitive tasks we hate doing.