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

The thing about this is that you can choose how high level you go.

For example you can just tell it to make a website for a business with a webshop and it'll just generate thousands of lines of code and you have no control over anything. Or you can spend hours/days writing the specification and then have it generate it.

Or you can do what I do and work iteratively one feature at a time making sure everything is exactly the way you want it. I generally solve the problem myself then tell it what to do, or if I'm not sure what the best solution is I might discuss with the AI until we agree on a plan and then have it execute it. Often this leads to me learning useful things, like it will suggest a tool/feature that I didn't know about that's perfect for my usecase or it will identify a problem in my plan that I wouldn't have found until after spending hours on the implementation.

I've always been very detail oriented and I care a lot about code quality, I want my solutions to be clean, consistent and as simple as possible while solving the problem. To me, AI tools let me do that more quickly and better, it's not a compromise it's just flat out better in every dimension. It's about how you use it.

A lot of people seem to think that it's a binary choice, either hand craft a high quality bespoke solution or just vibe code a pile of trash. There's a whole spectrum in between those two, and I think there's a sweet spot where you still maintain control and understanding, it's just much faster and the result is actually better because it's not just you and the knowledge in your brain it's also the AI that practically knows everything - it will teach you things and suggest solutions you wouldn't have thought about, it makes you a better developer. It's a force multiplier and the smarter you are the better you will be at using it.

It's not a replacement it's an enhancement. It's like imagine a developer with Google vs one without, obviously the one with Google will be better because they have access to more information. The AI is like automatic google that just googles everything all the time, things you wouldn't have even thought to Google or things you couldn't possibly formulate a good search term for. With AI you can just show it a screenshot or describe an issue in detail and get a really solid answer a lot of the time. It's like having an expert on standby all the time, sure it's sometimes wrong but most of the time it's not and if you're smart you'll recognize when it isn't.

I'd say anyone who isn't using AI today aren't using their full potential. I don't see how anyone could possibly perform better without this tool than with it. I do see how someone who doesn't care could produce a lot of slop, but the people who refuse to use it aren't that guy. That guy has been using it to produce slop for years already. You can use it to produce top quality code if you choose to.

Thank you, that was extraordinarily helpful.

I look forward to that blog post!

I'm a housekeeper skeptic. While I concede that a professional housekeeper would probably do a better job than me on most domestic tasks, I still think everyone should clean their own home, cook their own dinner, and write their own code.

I went for this one https://huggingface.co/yuxinlu1/gemma-4-12B-coder-fable5-com... and seems very fast, resonable...don't expect 100% replacement, but a lot of things can be done with local LLMs today.

I have tried it and I use it. I think it's going to become the standard way of operating, especially when they start charging us an API fee, which is supposedly the real cost. But of course, with how much they charge for the token and depending on the model, there are so many factors that I think the future is heading towards local models. I believe there are good models out there, and the key is the concept of "pruning," where you select the layers that interest you most and try to reduce the hardware cost of these types of models. The Qwen and Gemma models have been discussed here, but Kimi, which is a fairly powerful model with an efficient pruning system, could be your perfect free co-pilot in terms of coding, and could coexist with the more powerful Opus or Gemini models. The key concept is skills that make this process transparent.