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A guide to local coding models

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Re: A guide to local coding models

#131

Post by sheepscreek »

Aurornis wrote: post #123
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…

The limits for the $20/month plan can be reached in 10-20 minutes when having it explore large codebases with directed. It’s also easy to blow right through the quota if you’re not managing content well (waiting until it fills up and then auto-compacting, or even using /compact frequently instead of /clear or the equivalent in different tools). For most of my work I only need the LLM to perform a structured search of…

Not for Codex. Not even for Gemini/Antigravity! I am truly shocked by how much mileage I can get out of them. I recently bought the $200/mo OpenAI subscription but could barely use 10% of it. Now for over a month, I use codex for at least 2 hrs every day and have yet to reach the quota.

With Gemini/Antigravity, there’s the added benefit of switching to Claude Code Opus 4.5 once you hit your Gemini quota, and Google is waaaay more generous than Claude. I can use Opus alone for the entire coding session. It is bonkers.

So having subscribed to all three at their lowest subscriptions (for $60/mo) I get the best of each one and never run out of quota. I’ve also got a couple of open-source model subscriptions but I’ve barely had the chance to use them since Codex and Gemini got so good (and generous).

The fact that OpenAI is only spending 30% of their revenue on servers and inference despite being so generous is just mind boggling to me. I think the good times are likely going to last.

My advise - get Gemini + Codex lowest tier subscriptions. Add some credits to your codex subscription in case you hit the quota and can’t wait. You’ll never be spending over $100 even if you’re building complex apps like me.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#132

Post by asciii »

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…

> 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.

leo dicaprio snapping gif

These kinds of articles should focus on use case because mileage may vary depending on maturity of idea, testing and host of other factors.

If the app, service, or whatever is unproven, that's a sunk cost on macbook vs. 4 weeks to validate an idea which is a pretty long time.

If the idea is sound then run it on macbook :)

Re: A guide to local coding models

#133

Post by codetiger »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #77
satvikpendem wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

Came here to write something similar (Of course, other than working in Google) and saw your comments reflecting my views. Yes, Its worth pending $200/month on Claude to get my personal project ideas come to life with better quality and finish.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#134

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #123
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…

The limits for the $20/month plan can be reached in 10-20 minutes when having it explore large codebases with directed. It’s also easy to blow right through the quota if you’re not managing content well (waiting until it fills up and then auto-compacting, or even using /compact frequently instead of /clear or the equivalent in different tools). For most of my work I only need the LLM to perform a structured search of…

[deleted]

Re: A guide to local coding models

#135

Post by hu3 »

wyldfire wrote: post #113
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…

Is that really the case? This summer there was "Frontier AI performance becomes accessible on consumer hardware within a year" [1] which makes me think it's a mistake to discount the open weights models. [1] https://epoch.ai/data-insights/consumer-gpu-model-gap

Open weight models are neat.

But for SOTA performance you need specialized hardware. Even for Open Weight models.

40k in consumer hardware is never going to compete with 40k of AI specialized GPUs/servers.

Your link starts with:

> "Using a single top-of-the-line gaming GPU like NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 (under $2500), anyone can locally run models matching the absolute frontier of LLM performance from just 6 to 12 months ago."

I highly doubt a RTX 5090 can run anything that competes with Sonnet 3.5 which was released June, 2024.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#137

Post by _delirium »

deaux wrote: post #110
_delirium wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Huge caveat: For the $20/mo subscription Google hasn't made clear if they train on your data. Anthropic and OAI on the other hand either clearly state they don't train on paid usage or offer very straightforward opt-outs. https://geminicli.com/docs/faq/ > What is the privacy policy for using Gemini Code Assist or Gemini CLI if I’ve subscribed to Google AI Pro or Ultra? > To learn more about your privacy policy and te…

That's good to know, thanks. In my case nearly 100% of my code ends up public on GitHub, so I assume everyone's code models are training on it anyway. But would be worth considering if I had proprietary codebases.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#138

Post by nl »

kristopolous wrote: post #91
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 use local models + openrouter free ones. My monthly spend on ai models is I'm not cheap, just ahead of the curve. With the collapse in inference cost, everything will be this eventually I'll basically do $ man tool | or even $ cat source | Things I used to do intensively I now do lazily. I've even made a IEITYuan/Yuan-embedding-2.0-en database of my manpages with chroma and then I can just ask my local documentatio…

This is a completely different thing to AI coding models.

If you aren't using coding models you aren't ahead of the curve.

There are free coding models. I use them heavily. They are ok but only partial substitutes for frontier models.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#139

Post by Aurornis »

sheepscreek wrote: post #131
Aurornis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limits for the $20/month plan can be reached in 10-20 minutes when having it explore large codebases with directed. It’s also easy to blow right through the quota if you’re not managing content well (waiting until it fills up and then auto-compacting, or even using /compact frequently instead of /clear or the equivalent in different tools). For most of my work I only need the LLM to perform a structured search of…

Not for Codex. Not even for Gemini/Antigravity! I am truly shocked by how much mileage I can get out of them. I recently bought the $200/mo OpenAI subscription but could barely use 10% of it. Now for over a month, I use codex for at least 2 hrs every day and have yet to reach the quota. With Gemini/Antigravity, there’s the added benefit of switching to Claude Code Opus 4.5 once you hit your Gemini quota, and Google i…

> I recently bought the $200/mo OpenAI subscription but could barely use 10% of it

This entire comment is confusing. Why are you buying the $200/month plan if you’re only using 10% of it?

I rotate providers. My comment above applies to all of them. It really depends on the work you’re doing and the codebase. There are tasks where I can get decent results and barely make the usage bar move. There are other tasks where I’ve seen the usage bar jump over 20% for the session before I get any usable responses back. It really depends.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#140

Post by jmorgan »

ekianjo wrote: post #127
thehamkercat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is but people should use llama.cpp instead

Ollama did not open source their GUI.

The source is available here: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/tree/main/app
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