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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?

#81

Post by sbrother »

jacobgold wrote: post #62
pierotofy wrote: post #36

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 strongly agree on that being the release where these tools got good enough to substantially speed up my professional work. I have to admit I was super skeptical of AI coding until then.

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

#82

Post by bo1024 »

bluejay2387 wrote: post #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 experimen…

Qwen3.5-122B is actually Qwen3.5-122B-A10B. The A10B means that this is a "mixture of experts" model where only 10B parameters are activated at a given time. Whereas Qwen3.6-27B is a "dense" model where all 27B parameters are activated all the time. So for many tasks, you'd expect the 27B dense model to be better than the 122B-A10B model.

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

#83

Post by htrp »

trueno wrote: post #71
pierotofy wrote: post #36

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 have a 128gb m4 max macbook pro i've been wanting to tinker with this stuff but genuinely never find the time. any mac users in here running similar to the above that can share their experience? i always see great debates with local stuff but the space is constantly moving goalposts and all the vernacular is pretty unfamiliar to me. i'd love to understand what people with objective experience feel they've traded aw…

Use your ClaudeCode sub and tell it to set it up for you

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

#84

Post by gonzalohm »

horsawlarway wrote: post #49

For 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…

Did you double the tokens per second by adding a second GPU or was the increase significantly less?

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

#85

Post by codinhood »

jrm4 wrote: post #45
codinhood wrote: post #26

I 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 st…

If you’re arguing that model metrics don’t necessarily translate into useful output, I agree. That’s not how I measure the success of a mode and not really the point I'm trying to make. I try to set things up and test it on my actual projects.

What I’m saying is that if local models were actually comparable to Claude Code in practice, we wouldn’t be having threads like this. It would be obvious to the people using them, and it would be massively disruptive. Why would individuals and companies pay hundreds or thousands for Claude Code if they could run something locally and consistently get similar results?

Every month I revisit the local ecosystem hoping the answer has changed. So far, my experience has been that it hasn’t.

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

#86

Post by toyg »

dheera wrote: post #70
pierotofy wrote: post #36

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?

Yes, you've nailed it. Ollama are desperately trying to pull a Cursor - like 3791 other projects in this space.

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

#87

Post by vector_spaces »

jacobgold wrote: post #75
pierotofy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it for work.

That's cool if you prefer it, but it is hard to imagine it being a strictly rational choice when much better quality is available at a price that is small relative to the cost of an employee. Or is there something specific about your use-case?

Not all work requires every facet to be so sharply optimized, and there may be other constraints that are completely invisible to you. Some that were easy for me to imagine: the parent works in a heavily regulated industry, their IT team is slow-moving and paranoid and this is a safe, under-the-radar workaround, the output is "good enough" for their purposes and they find tinkering with it to be fun.

Regardless I don't think it's fruitful to be so condescending with such little insight into this person's situation. Even if you had total insight -- let people be and withhold your judgement, or at least keep it to yourself. Making people feel stupid is a great way to turn people off to pretty much anything else you have to say

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

#89

Post by zaptheimpaler »

I tried gemma-4-26B-A4B just to see if it could help me read/sort my emails on a relatively under-powered setup (16GB VRAM + 32GB RAM) and it's not going well.. the model burns 24K tokens just on searching for the right tool and then dumps the email contents into context - i tried to get it to use code-mode to save context but the code-mode implementation can't save files so it was useless and im going to try to switch to "ssh-mode" into my devbox container. Still relatively new to this, so I'm probably doing something wrong

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

#90

Post by gigatexal »

I tried to. I just couldn't get over how it made my otherwise whisper quiet M3 Max MacBook Pro 14 for the performance. The sweet spot has been adopting Claude Code to use the Chinese models. Deepseek V4 Pro is very, very good. But I am such a casual local user of AI that my 20/month Claude subscription is enough and I find myself using that more and more.
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