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AI coding at home without going broke

stephen.bochinski.dev

31–40 of 321 posts

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#31

Can I run something comparable to Opus 4.6 locally yet? I keep hearing conflicting things. If I can spend 10k to do that I would cancel my subscription. The problem is I don’t wanna spend the money to find out myself.

i spent 8k and get close to a 2-3x slower sonnet. running 2x spark deep seek v4 flash

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#32
post #16

I recently made an AI Agent and surprisingly coding with DeepSeek V4 Flash is quite cheap. It probably has to do with the aggressive prompt caching. I'm using OpenRouter with Novita AI as the preferred provider.

Deepseek v4 via deepseek themselves is significantly cheaper.

Because (1) Huawei collab and (2) vLLM etc dont implement half of the inference optimisations deepseek proposed in their paper.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#33
I invested about $4,000 in an NVIDIA DGX Spark several months ago. 128 GB of unified RAM, and the NVIDIA GB10 chip. With the RAM, the several CPU cores, and the 4 TB NVMe SSD, it's a very capable ARM64 Linux computer even without the GPU, and so far I've mostly been using it as such. But I wonder, what's the most capable model, specifically for coding, that can run well on that hardware?

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#34
post #11

For me, investing in hardware seems to be the way to go. I learned coding nearly 24 years ago and still learning new stuff all the time. At no point in time I had to rely on a subscription model to learn and do new stuff. If LLM and agents are the default tools for coding and building software, at least for next few years, it seems like a no-brainer to invest $2000-3000 on hardware, like a Halo Strix PC.

I wondered if there might be a no brainer "free" option on discarded hardware.

I have a GTX1080ti which i think is circa 2018, it's unused, more than paid for itself over the years, owes me nothing at this point so the hardware is free.

It runs Gemma e4b multimodal, qwen 3.5 8b or the qwen 4b embeddings models well enough (40+ t/s for the LLMs).

The machine consumes 350 watts at the wall when under load (3 watts when sleeping, 80w at idle). Electricity costs me £0.035GBP/kwh which is cheap for the UK (load shifting via house battery).

144k output tokens for around 1pence (and takes an hour to do that in theory).

It's only JUST cheaper to use than the far more capable deepseek v4 flash model despite the free hardware and ~10x cheaper than normal electricity.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#35
"Around $400 a month of plans buys roughly $2800 of API usage at list prices, which is a real bargain right up until you hit the ceiling."

I realize this text is just slop but it never stops being a "real bargain" at any point.

And it's more like $200/mo for $4000+/mo in tokens. You can also buy additional subscriptions.

There's no sense in running local models or doing anything else as long as VCs (and soon the public markets) are willing to pay your bill.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#36

Can I run something comparable to Opus 4.6 locally yet? I keep hearing conflicting things. If I can spend 10k to do that I would cancel my subscription. The problem is I don’t wanna spend the money to find out myself.

If you want frontier-level, the economically reasonable option is OpenRouter or a direct sub to frontier-of-your-choice. The reality is that they do not offer configurations that would allow a consumer to run that much VRAM on a single setup to protect datacenter margins. Apple used to, and they stopped, those devices are going for ~$20k+ each on ebay now. You can get very, very capable models on a 3090/4090/5090/600…

There are also significant economies of scale (namely: utilization and batching), which tend to make inference on a shared server more economical even after the operator takes a cut.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#37
What kind of usage chews through Claude Max x20? I use several agents with max effort in parallel and usually end up with something like 50% weekly usage. Fable almost allowed me to get to 70% but then they started resetting the limits mid-week and of course now ended the whole thing.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#39

"Around $400 a month of plans buys roughly $2800 of API usage at list prices, which is a real bargain right up until you hit the ceiling." I realize this text is just slop but it never stops being a "real bargain" at any point. And it's more like $200/mo for $4000+/mo in tokens. You can also buy additional subscriptions. There's no sense in running local models or doing anything else as long as VCs (and soon the publ…

Even if they were making a profit, their scale and expertise will obviously give you a cheaper product than what you can build.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#40
post #11

For me, investing in hardware seems to be the way to go. I learned coding nearly 24 years ago and still learning new stuff all the time. At no point in time I had to rely on a subscription model to learn and do new stuff. If LLM and agents are the default tools for coding and building software, at least for next few years, it seems like a no-brainer to invest $2000-3000 on hardware, like a Halo Strix PC.

3k? Try 10
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