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A guide to local coding models

aiforswes.com

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Re: A guide to local coding models

#21

Post by baq »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #15
simonw wrote: post #4

> I realized I looked at this more from the angle of a hobbiest paying for these coding tools. Someone doing little side projects—not someone in a production setting. I did this because I see a lot of people signing up for $100/mo or $200/mo coding subscriptions for personal projects when they likely don’t need to. Are people really doing that? If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans fr…

I'm convinced the $20 gpt plus plan is the best plan right now. You can use Codex with gpt5.2. I've been very impressed with this. (I also have the same MBP the author has and have used Aider with Qwen locally.)

bit the bullet this week and paid for a month of claude and a month of chatgpt plus. claude seems to have much lower token limits, both aggregate and rate-limited and GPT-5.2 isn't a bad model at all. $20 for claude is not enough even for a hobby project (after one day!), openai looks like it might be.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#23

Post by wyre »

simonw wrote: post #4

> I realized I looked at this more from the angle of a hobbiest paying for these coding tools. Someone doing little side projects—not someone in a production setting. I did this because I see a lot of people signing up for $100/mo or $200/mo coding subscriptions for personal projects when they likely don’t need to. Are people really doing that? If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans fr…

Me. Currently using Claude Max for personal coding projects. I've been on Claude's $20 plan and would run out of tokens. I don't want to give my money to OpenAI. So far these projects have not returned their value back to me, but I am viewing it as an investment in learning best pratices with these coding tools.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#24

Post by thehamkercat »

simonw wrote: post #5

This story talks about MLX and Ollama but doesn't mention LM Studio - https://lmstudio.ai/ LM Studio can run both MLX and GGUF models but does so from an Ollama style (but more full-featured) macOS GUI. They also have a very actively maintained model catalog at https://lmstudio.ai/models

I think you should mention that LM Studio isn't open source.

I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself?

Re: A guide to local coding models

#26

Post by satvikpendem »

thehamkercat wrote: post #24
simonw wrote: post #5

This story talks about MLX and Ollama but doesn't mention LM Studio - https://lmstudio.ai/ LM Studio can run both MLX and GGUF models but does so from an Ollama style (but more full-featured) macOS GUI. They also have a very actively maintained model catalog at https://lmstudio.ai/models

I think you should mention that LM Studio isn't open source. I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself?

Depends what people use them for, not every user of local models is doing so for privacy, some just don't like paying for online models.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#27

Post by satvikpendem »

simonw wrote: post #4

> I realized I looked at this more from the angle of a hobbiest paying for these coding tools. Someone doing little side projects—not someone in a production setting. I did this because I see a lot of people signing up for $100/mo or $200/mo coding subscriptions for personal projects when they likely don’t need to. Are people really doing that? If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans fr…

> If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans from OpenAI and Anthropic.

> The time to cough up $100 or $200/month is when you've exhausted your $20/month quota and you are frustrated at getting cut off. At that point you should be able to make a responsible decision by yourself.

These are the same people, by and large. What I have seen is users who purely vibe code everything and run into the limits of the $20/m models and pay up for the more expensive ones. Essentially they're trading learning coding (and time, in some cases, it's not always faster to vibe code than do it yourself) for money.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#29

Post by satvikpendem »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #12

I'm curious what the mental calculus was that a $5k laptop would competitively benchmark against SOTA models for the next 5 years was. Somewhat comically, the author seems to have made it about 2 days. Out of 1,825. I think the real story is the folly of fixating your eyes on shiny new hardware and searching for justifications. I'm too ashamed to admit how many times I've done that dance... Local models are purely fo…

> I'm curious what the mental calculus was that a $5k laptop would competitively benchmark against SOTA models for the next 5 years was.

Well, the hardware remains the same but local models get better and more efficient, so I don't think there is much difference between paying 5k for online models over 5 years vs getting a laptop (and well, you'll need a laptop anyway, so why not just get a good enough one to run local models in the first place?).

Re: A guide to local coding models

#30

Post by smcleod »

simonw wrote: post #4

> I realized I looked at this more from the angle of a hobbiest paying for these coding tools. Someone doing little side projects—not someone in a production setting. I did this because I see a lot of people signing up for $100/mo or $200/mo coding subscriptions for personal projects when they likely don’t need to. Are people really doing that? If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans fr…

On a $20/mo plan doing any sort of agentic coding you'll hit the 5hr window limits in less than 20 minutes.
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