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Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#51

Yes. Llama.cpp + Qwen3.6-35b (MTP) + OpenCode is quite capable and runs on a single RTX 3090 and is faster than most cloud models. Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago. Setup details at https://github.com/pierotofy/LocalCodingLLM/

Same. I have no desire to use Claude at all anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#52

My experience is that it's not the models themselves that are limiting right now, it's the clunky alternative harnesses with weird missing features making for bad ergonomics around stuff like queue management, interruption, subagents, goals, etc.

Heard good things about pi.dev but haven’t tried it. It might take care of some of those missing features you mentioned.

pi.dev is more like an agent developer kit. It's basically a substrate upon which you spend hours/days/weeks building your own agents or coding framework. It's pretty much the neovim to claude's vscode.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#54
I tried for a bit, with llama.cpp + Qwen + Mac Pro but the results were very poor (both quality and speed).

I considered investing in better hardware but doing the math, it is cheaper for me to pay for DeepSeek (yeah, I know not everyone can do that).

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#55
For personal needs I connected VSCode with llama.cpp running Qwen 3.6 27B or Gemma 4 31B and it's good enough to cancel my cloud subscription.

Qwen running on my 1st GPU at q4@176k context from 70 to 50 tok/s with MTP, pretty good for coding.

Gemma on the other hand is using both GPUs, running q8@64k context, doing document sentiment analysis, summarization, proofreading and translating, at consistent 25 tok/s. Somewhat slow but usable for batched workflows. Might get some more once llama.cpp starts supporting MTP with tensor split mode.

Still using frontier LLMs at dayjob since I'm not paying it and those are obviously better. Hopefully we'll have a Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.5 level 30B model in a year or so.

EDIT: Prompt processing starts from 800 t/s and drops to 400 t/s. In most cases my starting prompts are around 16k-24k of tokens and require from 60 to 90 seconds to be processed. Not great but acceptable.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#56
I tried many, many times and I keep trying. But I just don't see this happening: those tiny models that we can run on our machines (I have an M4 Max Mac, so I can reasonably run qwen3.6-35b-a3b or gemma-4-26b-a4b-qat at this time) are NOWHERE near as smart as the huge monsters like Opus/Fable. Nowhere. I can see a lot of people deluding themselves.

Sure, you can get the local models to generate plausibly-looking code for simple cases. But compared to how I solve complex design problems in a large codebase with Claude Code and Opus/Fable, this isn't worth my time.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

#59

Always a bit disappointed in the details in these kinds of threads. When you do get answers, they're never specific enough to try out on your own. It'll be something like "I use Qwen 3.5 and get great results!" OK but what quantization are you using? What llama parameters? What context size? What GPU are you running it on, and how much VRAM does it have? Are you hosting it on a separate box, or running it locally on…

All you get here is some market signal from 1 or 2 posts if you already know how to do it. Most of these responses are garbage.
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