Earlier quoted context omitted.
2x RTX3090 are around $4400. Without any electricity costs or other parts, that's 3.6 years of $100/m claude.
Assuming the $100/m claude subscription is still around in three years.
Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
411–420 of 620 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#412I 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…
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#413I 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…
I can use Gemini 3 Flash with the harness I built for around 8 years and still not exceed the cost of a Mac Studio with 128GB, the price for privacy is very high. Agentic flows that get stuck can be worked around but I prefer developer velocity.
And sounds like you haven't factored in the cost of electricity to run that Mac Studio as an LLM machine. Probably get a few more years.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#414Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#415A point that I haven't seen come up a lot, but is very valuable to me is that for open source models, I can select the inference provider myself (even if it's not a local GPU), which means that I can enjoy superb speed (i.e. 300 tok/s) while still spending much less than the big providers.
My experience is that if you were fine with the coding models of yesterday (i.e. Claude Opus from Jan/Feb of 2026), you will be fine with either Kimi K2.6 or DeepSeek v4 Pro. Kimi is a bit more smart but has only 256K context and the performance deteriorates (and sometimes just gets stuck) when it fills up the context window. DeepSeek v4 has a 1M context and performs just as well with much less issues. And they both generate very idiomatic code, gives the same vibe of Opus a few months ago.
Since it's also fast (and does not fixate on trying to fix impossible problems, unlike the recent Opus/GPT 5.5 models), a big benefit is that you still control and steer the coding agent and you won't be losing focus like the major models. They are smart, but they don't fixate as much on trying to do stupid things, and since it's fast, you can just interject. It's a much more pleasant experience than the latest models.
I still use the latest models time to time when I expect the agent to fixate all of the problems and figure out everything themselves, but for me open source models are like 80~90% of all of my sessions.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't speak for anyone else but there was a step change in frontier models last November. Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 I think. When I colloquially say Opus level I really mean Opus 4.5 or later
Right. Local models haven't quite hit that level yet. The biggest open models, which you need tens of thousands of dollars of hardware to run at reasonable speed, have pretty much hit that level of capability, but most models you can reasonably run at home aren't quite there yet. But given the gap, if local models keep improving, you'd expect to maybe see that level by this November.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, one of the ways that this problem manifests is that most local models aren't trained on preserving the full reasoning between turns. Every turn, they skip passing the reasoning trace from previous turns to the the LLM. So if on one turn you have a long interleaved chain of reasoning and tool calls, then it responds to you, and then you give a new prompt to fix something, it has to re-process all of those tools ca…
thats a harness issue not a model issue. eg i have my own reasoninf harness that forced persisted cot
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Under-rated take, thanks for stating this! Not everyone can plough $$$$ into hardware right now (more power to those who can), so choosing to rent is an A-Ok strategy.
It's ok if you can send your code and data to the provider. Some of us can't.
You can. You just don't want to. Huge difference.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#419I have been using local LLMs for about a year and I have settled now on Qwen3.6 27b dense model in GGUF on Mac Studio with 512G of RAM with open code as the harness and llmster(LM Studio). I have also used the Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B but the dense model's accuracy is next level with the tradeoff being tokens/sec. With the Qwen3.6 27b, I usually get anywhere from 25-40 tokens/second. Initially I used them for simple tools bu…
Since you have 512GB, might be worth looking into running deepseek4: https://github.com/antirez/ds4