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

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211–220 of 620 posts

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

#211

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

Having a second card doesn't really work well for gaming.

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

#212
post #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?

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

It was at first, then the developers realized they had a massive userbase they could monetize. A tale as old as open source...

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

#213

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)

Some of the work I do, I do for an (EU) organisation that doesn't have clear rules or guidelines on the use of AI yet. Though I have seen colleague-developers blatantly putting source code into external Claude-like models, I stay true to my principles and don't. I know for certain that everything that I run through my local, offline Pi Container Sandbox cannot leave the machine, and thus can't result in a data breach. I do this for the peace of mind.

I do (unscientifically) experiment whenever a new capable local LLM (<=130b) releases with a license that permits commercial use. As for knowing my models require more work than Opus, I don't mind still having to puzzle on getting the architecture right. In any case, it forces me to stay in the loop of what's being built, which is a good thing.

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

#214

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

In my personal experience, I wouldn't bother with 16GB cards for coding -- the useful models are _slightly_ too large to work at any reasonable speed

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

#216

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…

> It gets into loops quite often

matches my experience and a deal breaker

also the context window sizes are too low. I can't operate in 65,000 windows any more because even just reading the code's file structure overruns it and gets me nowhere. Definitely its own art form.

200k context windows and above for me now

I saw a paper last night that should help this a lot though

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

#217
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me put it like this. I started with local LLMs when ChatGPT still used GPT-3.5. I was amazed how my MacBook with 8GB RAM could run openhermes2.5-mistral: a 7b parameter model that could generate short stories that sort of made sense. Incredible! Two years later, and I'm running Qwen3.6 35b agentically to develop the start of a repository and automatically run tests to then improve on itself. I never thought we'd…

Haha well I ask because I don't really want/need anything beyond Opus most of the time. And I'm paranoid that Anthropic is going to be forced to charge the true cost of all this before too long.

The other upside of running local LLMs is that there's no cloud provider to suddenly charge more for the same, or even less, model use.

It's personal, but I prefer CapEx over OpEx for this. If you can purchase a device upfront that runs a decent local LLM, you get the peace of mind that your setup won't suddenly change over time and can only get better.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK nvidia cards dont work in tandem (aka sli in the past) very well these days. So that aint true. Also, 2 gens old means bad performance at ray tracing, abysmal path tracing if at all. Pretty sure it can't run smoothly CP2077 in native 4k without dlss upscalers with all on ultra.

You can have the 2nd card as an offload for upscaling, frame generation and whatnot.

When I'm not running models I use the 2nd one in a pass-thru configuration to a windows vm for various things, usually gaming.

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

#219
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very similar to my setup. Pi in a container (I do let it have network access, just no access to creds or anything, only the one directory that I'm working on at the time and my ~/.pi directory), talking to llama.cpp in another container. I'm on a Strix Halo 128 GiB unified memory laptop. I've never used the frontier models in earnest, I don't believe in using proprietary tools for my programming, so I can't r…

Hopefully this isn't off-topic, but your setup sounds just like mine, Strix Halo and (I'm assuming) llama.cpp on ROCm, and I'm finding that the Qwen hybrid models don't handle prompt caching and instead re-process the context in full on every turn. I'm wondering if you were able to solve this and how?

What harness are you using? Some of them (e.g. OpenCode) mutate the system prompt every turn, and therefore can't work with a KV cache.

I've had the best luck with Pi so far, but it comes without some bells and whistles you might be used to (e.g. plan mode, subagents, MCP client support)

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

#220
post #133

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…

> gemma (unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF) models Since you're running quantized (at UD-Q4_K_XL) , check out the "qat" models (unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF) ! - https://huggingface.co/unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF (With "Jun 9 Update: Added MTP support.") - https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...

TIL:

> Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) [...] allows preserving similar quality to bfloat16 while dramatically reducing the memory requirements to load the model

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