I use Qwen 3.6 35B A3B for agentic coding using GitHub Copilot Extension for VSCode. Mac Mini 128GB as the hardware. Seems reasonable for that model size, but I notice looping issue when problem becomes too big to solve. You can use it to do something that you know how to do (saves time).
Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
291–300 of 620 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#292I just use DeepSeekV4 Fast... It's cheap as hell. Currently my monthly usage has been 67M Ouput 51M Input Total $0.83 dollar. I honestly don't understand why people just don't use DeepSeek.
You mean deepseek-v4-flash, right? Same here. I use it for my Hermes agent. It's so cheap that I sometimes feel "guilty". I even put more money than I needed just make sure they do not go out of business.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#293I 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, and surprisingly often gets the edit tool call wrong I find that running better quantization, like Q8 tend to prevent this even though its a bit slower to run, it saves overall time with less churn Using 3.6-27b is even slower again than 3.6-35b, but I find the accuracy really pays off
Right. Tokens/s decode isn't the most important thing to me: wall clock time for task completion is. And tracking all of that, on my GB10-based Asus box, Step 3.7 Flash at IQ4_XS beats Qwen 3.6 27B despite the latter having MTP, on all of my actual coding task evaluations in real codebases.
Qwen seems better at one-shotting things based on vague prompts to an acceptable degree, but thats literally not what I use these things for!
One thing if people do play with it, is it seems very very sensitive to quantisation of the K part of the KV cache. F16 K and Q8 V got rid of a lot of the loops that it was otherwise hitting.
There's also a regression in llama.cpp wrt. Step Flash, where quantisation is getting worse KLD and Perplexity than it otherwise was previously, for the exact same quants. Very odd, but it's being looked into at least!
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#294I do qwen3.6 on an amd ai max laptop getting about 6-10tok/s it’s slow enough that I can follow along.
It has issues with design and large piles of code.
Otherwise it’s a good programming buddy.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#295I 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…
This is the only setup that I think is reasonable to use locally right now. I had an agent set it up for me from this guys recipe:
https://ikyle.me/blog/2026/how-to-setup-a-local-coding-agent...
One thing I did change was the context length to 256k rather than 64k.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#296[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#297Reading through these comments, I can't tell any more whats bots posting on behalf of the AI providers trying to dissuade or whether people just have had negative experiences with local ai models.
IMO, Qwen 3.6 27B 8k quants running on a Mac Studio 64g ram, incredible?. No it is not frontier general super shit, its just good. That's it, its good. Its free and private and can take an experienced engineer from being lazy to being really lazy, and that's magic right there. I use llama.cpp and opencode and have great moments of planning some code changes, and letting it run. Walk away. Chill in the hamoc, clean the dishes, have a wank, whatever. Use tmux and ssh in and check in on it. THIS is where the incredible comes in. Anyone telling you otherwise, well check their motives. I have no skin in the game. I just have an easy lazy time.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#298I 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…
Yup, it's fantastically useful.
Maybe even more useful than Opus when I have all the constraints to an issue. There is less "knowledge" in the model (I get by with 48GB of RAM allocated to an 8b quant), so it has fewer things to hallucinate about.
I've been getting to know its limits pretty well over the last few weeks and would say it's an excellent code search/replacement/generation* engine.
It's got the "in-context script generation" flow down as well, so it will easily help automate tasks that you describe with text and perhaps example commands, or tools, or skills* that you provide.
*Think of it + Pi as an NLP abstraction layer over grep, or a shell, rather than a jack of all trades + world knowledge all-in-one.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#299it's called your damn brain.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
#300I 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…
For the edit tool, you should consider implementing a hash-based approach where each line of code is hashed and referenced by it when doing replacements. You can read up on the approach here: https://blog.can.ac/2026/02/12/the-harness-problem/ I didn't do much benchmarking, but anecdotally, I found it to be making less edit errors. YMMV
Yup, I used this for a while and IME it may get you a few percentages more of useful context initially, so quality feels a bit higher, but things start breaking down in funnier ways when you do run out of that quality for any reason later, so definitely caveat emptor.