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Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

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411–420 of 620 posts

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#411

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.

I think there’s a reasonable argument that a burst bubble will cause prices to drop. Prices are very high because they’re trying to justify these trillion dollar valuations on IP alone. If that fantasy goes away then prices will fall down to just silicon and electricity, which looks more like Chinese model prices. Hard to say how it will play out but the direction isn’t obvious to me.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#412

I 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…

about the edit tool it is almost always trailing white spaces. if you give it a skill with a sed 's/( )*$//g' or something like that it speeds up things

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#413
post #315

I 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.

> 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

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?

#415
I'm not using my models locally, but the majority (80% or more) of my coding agent sessions run on open source models, i.e. DeepSeek v4 Pro and Kimi K2.6 with thinking.

A 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?

#416
post #326
post #323

Earlier 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.

My understanding is that we could in fact run the largest models on "reasonable" home hardware by focusing on throughput rather than raw speed and having them do unattended inference in large batches. The big proprietary suppliers have no interest in this because their own incentive is to fill all the physical space available with top-performing hardware and doing huge amounts of inference as quickly as possible. A home user with limited hardware investment has very different constraints.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#417
post #282

Earlier 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

Would you mind sharing your harness for reasoning?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#418
post #392

Earlier 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.

We're discussing home use.

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?

#419
post #284

I 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

I have tried plenty of other models with full FP32 as wel. However, in terms of balance between accuracy and speed, I found the Qwen 3.6 27B to be the sweet spot.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#420
I have an RTX 4060 12gb vram. Qwen3.6 35b. I stopped paying for Github Copilot. But I wouldn't say I replaced frontier models with a local one. I still have some dollars in my openrouter when I need to. Also to get interactive agentic coding speeds I need a high tps. So my quant is very small. And I would say a coding harness that is fully extensible is a must to create fully custom workflows tailored for low specs. I use pi (not perfect, still found some hard coded, non-extensible parts)
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