Isnt the math of buying Nvidia stock with what you pay for all the hardware and then just paying $20 a month for codex with the annual returns better?
If you can see into the future and know the stock price, then sure.
A guide to local coding models
71–80 of 363 posts
Re: A guide to local coding models
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
LMStudio is so much better than Ollama it's silly it's not more popular.
LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is but people should use llama.cpp instead
> but people should use llama.cpp instead
MLX is a lot more performant than Ollama and llama.cpp on Apple Silicon, comparing both peak memory usage + tok/s output.
edit: LM Studio benefits from MLX optimizations when running MLX compatible models.
Re: A guide to local coding models
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to do it cheap, get a desktop motherboard with two PCIe slots and two GPUs. Cheap tier is dual 3060 12G. Runs 24B Q6 and 32B Q4 at 16 tok/sec. The limitation is VRAM for large context. 1000 lines of code is ~20k tokens. 32k tokens is is ~10G VRAM. Expensive tier is dual 3090 or 4090 or 5090. You'd be able to run 32B Q8 with large context, or a 70B Q6. For software, llama.cpp and llama-swap. GGUF models fr…
I was going to post snark such as “you could use the same hardware to also lose money mining crypto” then realized there are a lot of crypto miners out their that could probably make more money running tokens then they do on crypto. Does such a market place exist?
This is essentially vast.ai, no?
Re: A guide to local coding models
#74Are people really so naive to think that the price/quality of proprietary models is going to stay the same forever? I would guess sometime in the next 2-3 years all of the major AI companies are going to increase the price/enshittify their models to the point where running local models is really going to be worth it.
Re: A guide to local coding models
#75> 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's $20 plan should be renamed to "trial". Try Opus and you will reach your limit in 10 minutes. With Sonnet, if you aren't clearing the context very often, you'll hit it within a few hours. I'm sympathetic to developers who are using this as their only AI subscription because while I was working on a challenging bug yesterday I reached the limit before it had even diagnosed the problem and had to switch to anot…
> With Sonnet, if you aren't clearing the context very often, you'll hit it within a few hours.
Do you mean that users should start a new chat for every new task, to save tokens? Thanks.
Re: A guide to local coding models
#76> 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…
Codex $20 is a good deal but they have nothing inbetween $20 and $200.
The $20 Anthropic plan is only enough to wet my appetite, I can't finish anything.
I pay for $100 Anthropic plan, and keep a $20 Codex plan in my back pocket for getting it to do additional review and analysis overtop of what Opus cooks up.
And I have a few small $ of misc credits in DeepSeek and Kimi K2 AI services mainly to try them out, and for tasks that aren't as complicated, and for writing my own agent tools.
$20 Claude doesn't go very far.
Re: A guide to local coding models
#77> 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…
I've been a software developer for 25 years, and 30ish years in the industry, and have been programming my whole life. I worked at Google for 10 of those years. I work in C++ and Rust. I know how to write code.
I don't pay $100 to "vibe code" and "learn to program" or "avoid learning to program."
I pay $100 so I can get my personal (open source) projects done faster and more completely without having to hire people with money I don't have.
Re: A guide to local coding models
#78> 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…
Yes, we are doing that. These tools help make my personal projects come to life, and the money is well worth it. I can hit Claude Code limits within an hour, and there's no way I'm giving OpenAI my money.
As a third option, I've found I can do a few hours a day on the $20/mo Google plan. I don't think Gemini is quite as good as Claude for my uses, but it's good enough and you get a lot of tokens for your $20. Make sure to enable the Gemini 3 preview in gemini-cli though (not enabled by default).
Re: A guide to local coding models
#79Cline + RooCode and VSCode already works really well with local models like qwen3-coder or even the latest gpt-oss. It is not as plug-and-play as Claude but it gets you to a point where you only have to do the last 5% of the work
What are you working on that you’ve had such great success with gpt-oss? I didn’t try it long because I got frustrated waiting for it to spit out wrong answers. But I’m open to trying again.
I use it to build some side-projects, mostly apps for mobile devices. It is really good with Swift for some reason.
I also use it to start off MVP projects that involve both frontend and API development but you have to be super verbose, unlike when using Claude. The context window is also small, so you need to know how to break it up in parts that you can put together on your own
Re: A guide to local coding models
#80> 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's $20 plan should be renamed to "trial". Try Opus and you will reach your limit in 10 minutes. With Sonnet, if you aren't clearing the context very often, you'll hit it within a few hours. I'm sympathetic to developers who are using this as their only AI subscription because while I was working on a challenging bug yesterday I reached the limit before it had even diagnosed the problem and had to switch to anot…
the only thing that matters is whether or not you are getting your money’s worth. nothing else matters. if claude is worth $100 or $200 per month to you, it is an easy decision to pay. otherwise stick with $20 or nothing