I use Pi and Qwen 3.6 27b locally on a 4090 for all my personal projects. I still use Claude for day job work since they pay for it, and my employer expects me to use it. I rarely touch it otherwise.
Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
41–50 of 620 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#42The problem with this question is that it encompasses a huge spectrum of capabilities and expectations. If you can only run an 8B model and expect it to be good at vibe coding / one shotting things you're going to have a bad time. If you're able to run a model on the scale of ~30B, you can find that with a reasonably scoped and well defined task they do very well. I've found both Gemma4-31B and Qwen3.6-27B to be the…
I use Gemma 4 26B A4B on my Macbook (M4 Pro, 48 GB RAM) to study Rust (and ask other myriad questions). I don't trust it to do a good job in an IDE/harness to one-shot anything but the most trivial of changes. Still, it's fast and good enough that it could handle being a "co-pilot" on small to medium context tasks where you've got your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road — and are driving under the speed limit. That's remarkable given where we were a couple of years ago.
I don't think I'd be using AI to code at all if this weren't the case. (I don't want to feel stunted or stuck just from losing my internet connection.)
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#43Our software dev (smartest guy I ever met) is using OpenCode and Tmux with Open Source models. He says the DeepSeek is his model of choice for coding (he call's it "pretty GOOD". He's running two 3090s on an i9 with 128GB RAM. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/china-s-open-deeps...
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#44I've had some success with local models by chaining "agents" together in a workflow. Each agent has a different prompt and uses a different ollama model based on what their role is. The project manager, schema agent(qwen3:14b), etc. doesn't use the same model as the coding agent (qwen2.5-coder:7b). Between each step is an orchestrator and with a Playwright task which attempts to surface errors to the agent who introduced the previous code block. Only error-free blocks are forwarded to the next workflow step.
Probably the biggest improvement was including a backend-for-agents service definition which instructed the schema agent they were to only produce only a manifest based on the task, and to pass off that off to the next agent.
In short, I split tasks up into many pieces by defining a workflow where agents are only allowed to do very specific things before their work is passed along. This keeps them grounded and capable while also creating places for me to intervene if a workflow was say 25% or 90% successful.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#45I don't think you're going to get many "true" answers to this. The opportunity cost of not using the latest and best models is just too much right now. Every month I research this and come to the same conclusion: the time, effort, and cost required to get local models (and the coding tools around them) to perform even close to Claude Code with sonnet/opus just not worth it right now. If it was, it would be distributi…
But you're pretty much measuring opportunity cost in tokens per second, no?
I think it strongly remains to be seen whether e.g. tokens per second (multiplied or whatever by percieved quality of private model) actually means "better or more useful output."
I strongly suspect it does not. (though I also strongly suspect this will be very difficult to measure because the incentive to lie about metrics here will be so strong.)
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#46I am working on exactly this issue right now. My approach is that a highly optimized harness (pi.dev) with the right backing knowledgebase (a custom, self-updating wiki with lots of QC layers) can get close to most of my usage patterns for my Claude Max 20x subscription. I use Gemma 4 26B QAT served by a custom fork of llama.cpp, with 4-8 slots of 256k context at Q8. It's a very good model when the harness keeps it on rails. In an age of 1M context windows, 256k may seem small but it's been plenty for my work (scientific programming). A $20/month subscription to Ollama-cloud gets me good coverage of consults out to frontier models for difficult plans or debugging (again this is all woven into my highly customized pi install).
I'm still optimizing it (with claude, to be clear), but my testing is very encouraging. I worry a lot about companies (and the government) controlling access to machine intelligence, so local is the way to go.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#47Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#48Related: Are there any viable distributed AI models? Like how we've had SETI at Home, Folding at Home, BitTorrent etc. People are clearly willing to donate their computer resources to distributed projects. Maybe in a dAI network anyone could submit content for training on, and each user running a "node" could have their own custom private conditions on which type of content to accept for training or inference. Like s…
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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#49For personal use, yes.
I replaced a $100/m subscription to claude in favor of running pi harness pointed at unsloth studio, using both qwen (unsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MTP-GGUF) and gemma (unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF) models, depending on my mood.
I have a machine I built about 5 years ago with dual RTX3090s in it (I was going to build a new gaming machine anyways, and the llama release had just dropped so I tacked another used 3090 onto the build), and I get ~150tok/s on either of those models (at UD-Q4_K_XL quant) and can use the entire 300k context length without having to exit VRAM.
To be very clear - it's not as good as claude. But it's free and not so much worse that it matters significantly.
For my personal needs, free beats $100/m.
I also have an openclaw instance pointed at the same inference server, and it's great for that (genuinely solid use-case for local models).
Some example projects
- Replacement launcher for android tvs (with usage monitoring and tracking for kids)
- Custom admin portals for my k8s cluster services
- Custom home assistant integrations/automations (recently some shelly devices for power monitoring and switching)
- Grocery list management and meal planning (mostly via openclaw)
- some custom workflows for 3d asset generation in comfyui.
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Long story short, if you're trying to make money via software... I'd probably still recommend using a paid provider. But the local models are very capable of cool stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#50Yes, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on a Strix Halo 128GB (Bosgame M5).
I have way too much VRAM forme such a model but Qwen never released the 122B version of Qwen3.6, which is the best class of model for my hardware. But at the same time my electricity bill is negligible, this is originally a laptop chip and it shows, it consumes almost nothing while idle and a little above 120W during prompt processing.
And Qwen3.6 has been surprisingly effective for me, I still use Clause occasionally but only for like 10% of my needs which allows me to stay well under the quota even with the cheapest plan.
Speed: ~800tps prompt processing and 50tps for token generation (with no speculative decoding).