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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?

#191

Post by mark_l_watson »

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…

Sounds like a correct conclusion to me also. I am trying to transition to a layered system: local, then OpenCode with commercial vendor APIs for models like DeepSeek v4 flash, then DeepSeek v4 Pro.

With a layered approach we can slowly shift to running more locally and still get required work done. Really, my local setup is so much better than it was 2 months ago, and extremely better than 6 months ago - on the same hardware.

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

#192

Post by computerex »

zozbot234 wrote: post #170
jmuguy wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given your knowledge on this - do you think we'll see an open source model with Opus levels of capability? IMO if/when this happens - I would 100% stop using Anthropic.

People can't seem to agree on what "Opus class" even means (the latest Opus is apparently pretty weak) but DeepSeek Pro, Kimi and GLM all are quite capable.

Nothing compares to Opus when it comes to "taste" in web design in my experience. Nothing compares to opus in very difficult HPC/model inference development. I worked on this with opus: https://github.com/computerex/dlgo

OpenAI was offering 2x usage at one point and I still used opus just because it's so much more effective.

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

#193

Post by drnick1 »

augusto-moura wrote: post #141
freetonik wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also years of top tier PC gaming, if you're into that.

2x RTX3090 is extremely overkill for gaming, you can run any released game on earth on ultra for much less

1x RTX3090 is absolutely not overkill for gaming however. Nowadays it's barely enough to get 60FPS in 4K in some recently released games. But the shocking part is that my 3090 is still probably worth as much as when I bought it about 4 years ago.

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

#194

Post by electronsoup »

htrp wrote: post #80
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…

why 27b vs 35b? Is MoE that much worse for coding?

Yeah MoE is a little worse for the same size, but you can often run bigger MoEs at respectable speeds even on cpu ram offload. The dense models really need to be 100% vram

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

#195

Post by MrScruff »

lambda wrote: post #179
jmuguy wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given your knowledge on this - do you think we'll see an open source model with Opus levels of capability? IMO if/when this happens - I would 100% stop using Anthropic.

If you believe the benchmarks, Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B already outperforms Claude 4 Opus. Now, there's a bit of a degree to which some of the open source models do some benchmaxxing, and bigger models with more params may always feel like they have more depth. But anyhow, right now you have something that is arguably comparable to Claude 4 Opus on your laptop. I can't really compare myself because I never used it. It looks…

You really need to take the benchmarks with a massive pinch of salt. I’ve been testing local LLMs since the original llama and there’s nothing I’ve tried that is in the same category as Opus.

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

#196

Post by lambda »

tripleee wrote: post #184
rootlocus wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x RTX3090 are around $4400. Without any electricity costs or other parts, that's 3.6 years of $100/m claude.

Christ GPU prices have gotten crazy How do AMD cards perform with LLMs? A 9070 is sold for ~$600 and has 16GB VRAM

That should do pretty well. Memory bandwidth is the biggest bottleneck for token generation, at 644 GB/s you should be able to do pretty well on a 9070, while prompt proessing is more compute bound and Nvidia tends to have the edge there.

16 GiB won't fit you much, so you'd probably want at least 2x, and preferably 3x of those, and then you need a motherboard, power, etc. that can handle that.

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

#198

Post by ltononro »

Greenpants wrote: post #112

I have! I care about data privacy and LLMs being free. I'm using the Pi coding harness but containerized and sandboxed, to make sure it's running completely offline. On my Mac Studio with 128GB RAM (or MacBook with 36GB RAM) I'm using Qwen3.6 35b, with only 3b active parameters so that it runs really fast. I've done a complete redesign for my website's homepage and blog with Django + Wagtail. The latter is interestin…

What kind of coding do you do? Do you keep track of frontier models to vibe check the differences and re-evaluate constantly or are you ok with having a nerfed model forever? (not being judmental, just really wanto to know your framework here)

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

#200

Post by lambda »

MrScruff wrote: post #195
lambda wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe the benchmarks, Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B already outperforms Claude 4 Opus. Now, there's a bit of a degree to which some of the open source models do some benchmaxxing, and bigger models with more params may always feel like they have more depth. But anyhow, right now you have something that is arguably comparable to Claude 4 Opus on your laptop. I can't really compare myself because I never used it. It looks…

You really need to take the benchmarks with a massive pinch of salt. I’ve been testing local LLMs since the original llama and there’s nothing I’ve tried that is in the same category as Opus.

Which Opus? They certainly outperform Claude 3 Opus.

Anyhow, feel free to try them out head to head on OpenRouter. I'd love to see someone write up their results, of a modern local sized open source model vs. frontier models from ~a year ago, on something other than the standard benchmarks.

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