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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?

#61

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.

Yep. Screw Anthropic, CloseAI and all other rent seekers in this space.

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

#62

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/

"Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago."

That sounds great for hobbyists but IMHO it wasn't until Opus 4.6 was released six months go (Dec 25, 2025) that we had a model good enough for professionals to use as a primary driver of their coding agents. That seems to be the threshold worth aiming for.

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

#63

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/

how much does the setup cost if i want to buy all the hardware now and increased power costs?

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

#64

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/

I use it, it's good, I get work done, but know that they really mean it when they say

> "Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago"

Don't expect Opus, expect more like Haiku. If you micromanage it, you'll get great results. If you want it to be a human in a box, it'll flounder.

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

#65

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.

Pi is decent.

I've used the cli agents for claude, cursor, and pi, plus several custom harnesses I've written myself from time to time as experiments (and I guess technically gastown, if we're calling that a harness).

Pi is... just fine.

It does what I need it to, has a decent selection of tooling out of the box, integrates nicely with other tools, and generally gets out of my way enough that I don't think about it much anymore.

If you can run ~30b models at decent speeds, I think most folks would be pleasantly surprised at how capable they are with pi.

Tack on some of the extensions (ex https://pi.dev/packages/pi-mcp-adapter?name=mcp and https://pi.dev/packages/pi-web-access?name=search) and I get web tooling (ex - perplexity search), access to mcps to do things like drive chrome (https://browsermcp.io/) or firefox (https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp)

It's fine. Is it as good as a subsidized top tier model? Nope. Is it free and still very capable? Yup.

And personally, I've been having a LOT of fun with the pi sdk (https://pi.dev/docs/latest/sdk)

Which is something that all the other providers charge you api access rates for (ex - thousands a month).

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

#67

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/

"Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago." That sounds great for hobbyists but IMHO it wasn't until Opus 4.6 was released six months go (Dec 25, 2025) that we had a model good enough for professionals to use as a primary driver of their coding agents. That seems to be the threshold worth aiming for.

I use it for work.

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

#68
About 90% of my coding is on Qwen 3.6 27b and Open Code with some custom skills and Semble. It is NOT as smart as CC or Codex but its enough to get most of my work done. I didn't set out to replace CC and Codex (I have an RTX 6000 so the TPS is faster than I care about, but the RTX 6000 was originally for other work). I only tried this just to see how close you could get to a frontier model for coding as an experiment, but it was good enough that I stuck with it. I still fall back to Codex for really complicated stuff and to polish UI's as that seems to be the weakest element to working in Qwen.This isn't a recommendation because I don't think most people have an RTX 6000 laying around and the cost would be many years of MAX CC or Codex subscriptions, but at least this seems possible. Maybe in a few more years it will even be practical.

Other Notes: I have had to set the compact target to 75% on a 256k context window as once the conversation length goes about 100k I start seeing a drop in the quality and speed. This becomes very problematic after about 150k. I tried Qwen 3.5 122b too but it actually seems much worse at coding than 3.6 27b even though its much larger. Maybe because I am using a 4bit quant or maybe I just don't have it configured correctly? I know 3.6 is newer but I didn't expect it to out perform a model that is much larger from the prior generation. Gemma 4 31b is a good model for other tasks but at least my personal experience is that Qwen outperforms in coding. Nemotron Super 120b is great at a lot of stuff but it also seems to be not as good at coding as Qwen. This was very surprising to me.

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

#69
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean - the base experience is just fine, with perfectly reasonable built in tools for file access and editing, plus bash.

But yes - it expands a lot if you're willing to play with it.

I'd actually say the vscode comparison is wrong, because vscode is very much "bring your own extension" in the same way that Pi is. While Claude is much more "visual studio" vibes. It's thick, it's opinionated, and it's absolutely not something you can really customize, but it can feel slick for supported workflows.

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

#70

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/

Am I doing something wrong or has ollama become shittified?

I'm looking at https://ollama.com/search and the top few models like kimi-k2.7-code say "cloud" and I can't seem to ollama pull them.

I thought the whole POINT of ollama was not-cloud?

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