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How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

ikyle.me

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Re: How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

#41

or you can just load up ollama, have it load a local model and point claude or opencode at it... is this article old? It's not. I'm not sure why he went through all the bother of llama.cpp

That was exactly my same question. Then I finished reading the post. The reason is pretty clear, and written in the post: it is faster than ollama+mlx.

how much faster?

Re: How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

#42
I poured a couple days into custom Burn inference for Qwen3-Coder-Next only to find it doesn't come with a speculative decoder, so on my M4 Max I can't push it much further than 120t/s. That's still kinda slow, though still faster than llama.cpp's 70.9t/s and MLX's 80.6t/s with the same model. Claude Fable 5 is recommending I use the Qwen3 MTP -- I worry that will compromise the quality somewhat, but might give it a try to see if I can get more usable speeds.

Re: How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

#44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if the future is "Claude, think for me" I'm happy to stay at the good old present.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/when-educators-mo... New decade, same old argument. It's not > "Claude, think for me" It's > "Claude, be my subordinate and get this done for me" Instead of complaining on the sidelines, I'm getting a shit ton of work done.

For what it's worth, even this reply reads like LLM output. It's not "quote describing the scenario", it's "some other linked-in-coded plot twist". If you're the average of the people you spend the most time around, and you spend the most time around a chatbot, do you start to absorb its speech patterns and logic structures?

Yeah, good ol' present for me too then, thanks.

Re: How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

#45
post #21
post #19

I have used omlx.ai with great success to both download multiple mlx models (including gemma and qwen) suited for my hardware AND to be able to automagically launch both open-source and close-source (claude code, codex) harnesses using these models. All from a web or desktop UI You would not need to follow a blog post with omlx IMHO

It truly is the SOTA for local inference on mac. Even when there are regressions the dev(s) are insanely responsive. It is the most impressive opensource project I've seen in a awhile

Omlx needs to incorporate macos native shortcuts use - macos can almost instantly extract text from pdfs and a bunch of other things using it's ane neural engine keeping unified ram for llm use. The two together would be awesome

Re: How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

#47
post #19

I have used omlx.ai with great success to both download multiple mlx models (including gemma and qwen) suited for my hardware AND to be able to automagically launch both open-source and close-source (claude code, codex) harnesses using these models. All from a web or desktop UI You would not need to follow a blog post with omlx IMHO

In case anyone is looking for a sandbox to go with oMLX and Pi: https://github.com/Dotnaught/pi-sandbox

Re: How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

#49
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if the future is "Claude, think for me" I'm happy to stay at the good old present.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/when-educators-mo... New decade, same old argument. It's not > "Claude, think for me" It's > "Claude, be my subordinate and get this done for me" Instead of complaining on the sidelines, I'm getting a shit ton of work done.

> I'm getting a shit ton of work done.

It’s weird when people are proud of doing ton of work. Im the opposite, Im proud that Im doing minimal stuff without llms.

Re: How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

#50

>64 GB Thats the rub. I have an M4 with 48G. I wonder if it is worth testing this out. My past attempts (with Ollama and various LLMs) were too slow to use.

M4 24GB here. You'll be fine, if you're anything like me minor latency is acceptable to obtain (a) privacy (b) reliability (c) CI/CD/guardrails (d) network independence (e) future-proofing vs. AIaaS. https://omlx.ai/ gives you intelligent local hardware based model download recommendations. That said it probably depends heavily on your workload, process and polish expectations. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48089091
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