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Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
361–370 of 620 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of coding do you do? Do you keep track of frontier models to vibe check the differences and re-evaluate constantly or are you ok with having a nerfed model forever? (not being judmental, just really wanto to know your framework here)
Some of the work I do, I do for an (EU) organisation that doesn't have clear rules or guidelines on the use of AI yet. Though I have seen colleague-developers blatantly putting source code into external Claude-like models, I stay true to my principles and don't. I know for certain that everything that I run through my local, offline Pi Container Sandbox cannot leave the machine, and thus can't result in a data breach…
I'm adding Pi to Nemesis8 right now because I saw your comment, so thank you!
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#363I don't think you're going to get many "true" answers to this. The opportunity cost of not using the latest and best models is just too much right now. Every month I research this and come to the same conclusion: the time, effort, and cost required to get local models (and the coding tools around them) to perform even close to Claude Code with sonnet/opus just not worth it right now. If it was, it would be distributi…
The opportunity cost to who? Its getting super expensive for businesses and engineers across the board to pay for frontier models.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#364I have! I care about data privacy and LLMs being free. I'm using the Pi coding harness but containerized and sandboxed, to make sure it's running completely offline. On my Mac Studio with 128GB RAM (or MacBook with 36GB RAM) I'm using Qwen3.6 35b, with only 3b active parameters so that it runs really fast. I've done a complete redesign for my website's homepage and blog with Django + Wagtail. The latter is interestin…
> is like a junior with knowledge across the board, that you really need to guide, versus a senior that thinks with you on architecture
I don't want to be rude, but your linkedin has a sumtotal (generous) of like 8 months of programming as a profession (job title is AI Engineer). The rest is at best programming adjacent. How would you know what either of these situations are really like?
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#365I have! I care about data privacy and LLMs being free. I'm using the Pi coding harness but containerized and sandboxed, to make sure it's running completely offline. On my Mac Studio with 128GB RAM (or MacBook with 36GB RAM) I'm using Qwen3.6 35b, with only 3b active parameters so that it runs really fast. I've done a complete redesign for my website's homepage and blog with Django + Wagtail. The latter is interestin…
> is like a junior with knowledge across the board, that you really need to guide, versus a senior that thinks with you on architecture I don't want to be rude, but your linkedin has a sumtotal (generous) of like 8 months of programming as a profession (job title is AI Engineer). The rest is at best programming adjacent. How would you know what either of these situations are really like?
I haven't logged in to LinkedIn or looked at it since a former employer demanded that everyone create a profile. So mine is now about 20 years out of date.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#366For personal needs I connected VSCode with llama.cpp running Qwen 3.6 27B or Gemma 4 31B and it's good enough to cancel my cloud subscription. Qwen running on my 1st GPU at q4@176k context from 70 to 50 tok/s with MTP, pretty good for coding. Gemma on the other hand is using both GPUs, running q8@64k context, doing document sentiment analysis, summarization, proofreading and translating, at consistent 25 tok/s. Somew…
What extension do you use in vscode to connect it to local llama.cpp? Or do you auth with github copilot and then point to localhost? Or something else?
i made this specifically for use with vscode/llama.cpp: https://github.com/khimaros/mortar
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very similar to my setup. Pi in a container (I do let it have network access, just no access to creds or anything, only the one directory that I'm working on at the time and my ~/.pi directory), talking to llama.cpp in another container. I'm on a Strix Halo 128 GiB unified memory laptop. I've never used the frontier models in earnest, I don't believe in using proprietary tools for my programming, so I can't r…
>I'm still a AI skeptic What does this mean in June 2026 wrt coding? To me it sounds like being a "rice cooker skeptic". Some people don't like using rice cookers, some do.
For me the distinction is that your rice only needs to be edible once, while your code may need to last for decades. Using AI to code anything I could comfortably throw away if needed is a lot less fraught than letting it make choices that I and anybody who inherits the code is gonna have to live with, especially if by outsourcing those choices I reduce my understanding of the implications of those choices.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#368I have! I care about data privacy and LLMs being free. I'm using the Pi coding harness but containerized and sandboxed, to make sure it's running completely offline. On my Mac Studio with 128GB RAM (or MacBook with 36GB RAM) I'm using Qwen3.6 35b, with only 3b active parameters so that it runs really fast. I've done a complete redesign for my website's homepage and blog with Django + Wagtail. The latter is interestin…
Sounds super cool, don't get me wrong, but I suppose for most people the bar is higher than HTML/CSS.
I use local LLMs on my Mac Studio to write and pass unit test suites in F#, among other boring project chores I don't want to do myself.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#369[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very similar to my setup. Pi in a container (I do let it have network access, just no access to creds or anything, only the one directory that I'm working on at the time and my ~/.pi directory), talking to llama.cpp in another container. I'm on a Strix Halo 128 GiB unified memory laptop. I've never used the frontier models in earnest, I don't believe in using proprietary tools for my programming, so I can't r…
>I'm still a AI skeptic What does this mean in June 2026 wrt coding? To me it sounds like being a "rice cooker skeptic". Some people don't like using rice cookers, some do.
I assume it means they are not sure it gives them a speed up. Which, since I don't know what they are trying to do, may be reasonable.