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A guide to local coding models

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Re: A guide to local coding models

#51

Post by slicktux »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #17
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 agree with everything you said, and yet I cannot help but respect a person who wants to do it himself. It reminds me of the hacker culture of the 80s and 90s.

Agreed, Everyone seems to shun the DIY hacker now a days; saying things like “I’ll just pay for it”. It’s not about just NOT paying for it but doing it yourself and learning how to do it so that you can pass the knowledge on and someone else can do it.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#52

Post by minimaxir »

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…

Claude 4.5 Opus on Claude Code's $20 plan is funny because you get about 2-3 prompts on any nontrivial task before you hit the session limit.

If I wasn't only using it for side projects I'd have to cough up the $200 out of necessity.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#53

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

I don’t think I’ve ever read an article where the reason I knew the author was completely wrong about all of their assumptions was that they admitted it themselves and left the bad assumptions in the article.

The above paragraph is meant to be a compliment.

But justifying it based on keeping his Mac for five years is crazy. At the rate things are moving, coding models are going to get so much better in a year, the gap is going to widen.

Also in the case of his father where he is working for a company that must use a self hosted model or any other company that needed it, would a $10K Mac Studio with 512GB RAM be worth it? What about two Mac Studios connected over Thunderbolt using the newly released support in macOS 26?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644

Re: A guide to local coding models

#54

Post by davidw »

slicktux wrote: post #51
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said, and yet I cannot help but respect a person who wants to do it himself. It reminds me of the hacker culture of the 80s and 90s.

Agreed, Everyone seems to shun the DIY hacker now a days; saying things like “I’ll just pay for it”. It’s not about just NOT paying for it but doing it yourself and learning how to do it so that you can pass the knowledge on and someone else can do it.

I loathe the idea of being beholden to large corporations for what may be a key part of this job in the future.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#55

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #50
smcleod wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With Codex it only happened to me once in my 4.5hr session here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/ Claude Code is a whole lot less generous though.

[deleted]

Re: A guide to local coding models

#56

Post by snoman »

andix wrote: post #38

I wouldn't run local models on the development PC. Instead run them on a box in another room or another location. Less fan noise and it won't influence the performance of the pc you're working on. Latency is not an issue at all for LLMs, even a few hundred ms won't matter. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, except when working offline while traveling.

Less of a concern these days with hardware like a Mac Studio or Nvidia dgx which are accessible and aren’t noisy at all.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#57

Post by evacchi »

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

ramalama.ai is worth mentioning too

Re: A guide to local coding models

#58

Post by asabla »

andix wrote: post #47
__mharrison__ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

From my personal experience it's around 50:50 between Claude and Codex. Some people strongly prefer one over the other. I couldn't figure out yet why. I just can't accept how slow codex is, and that you can't really use it interactively because of that. I prefer to just watch Claude code work and stop it once I don't like the direction it's taking.

From my point of view, you're either choosing between instruction following or more creative solutions.

Codex models tend to be extremely good at following instructions, to the point that it won't do any additional work unless you ask it to. GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2 on the other hand is a little bit more creative.

Models from Anthropics on the other hand is a lot more loosy goosy on the instructions, and you need to keep an eye on it much more often.

I'm using models interchangeably from both providers all the time depending on the task at hand. No real preference if one is better then the other, they're just specialized on different things

Re: A guide to local coding models

#59

Post by allenu »

andix wrote: post #45
smcleod wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It really depends. When building a lot of new features it happens quite fast. With some attention to context length I was often able to go for over an hour on the 20$ claude plan. If you're doing mostly smaller changes, you can go all day with the 20$ Claude plan without hitting the limits. Especially if you need to thoroughly review the AI changes for correctness, instead of relying on automated tests.

I find that I use it on isolated changes where Claude doesn’t really need to access a ton of files to figure out what to do and I can easily use it without hitting limits. The only time I hit the 4-5 hour limit is when I’m going nuts on a prototype idea and vibe coding absolutely everything, and usually when I hit the limit, I’m pretty mentally spent anyway so I use it as a sign to go do something else. I suppose everyone has different styles and different codebases, but for me I can pretty easily stay under the limit without that it’s hard to justify $100 or $200 a month.
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