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April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

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Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#101

Slightly off topic, but question for folks. I'm hoping to replace coding with Claude Sonnet 4.5 with a model with an open source or open weights model. Are any of the models on Ollama.com cloud offering ( https://ollama.com/search?c=cloud ) or any of the models on OpenRouter.ai a close replacement? I know that no model right now matches the full performance and capabilities of Claude Sonnet 4.5, but I want to know ho…

Yes GLM5 and KimiK2.5 are pretty close replacements for sonnet.

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#102

Slightly off topic, but question for folks. I'm hoping to replace coding with Claude Sonnet 4.5 with a model with an open source or open weights model. Are any of the models on Ollama.com cloud offering ( https://ollama.com/search?c=cloud ) or any of the models on OpenRouter.ai a close replacement? I know that no model right now matches the full performance and capabilities of Claude Sonnet 4.5, but I want to know ho…

In short: no.

Nothing comes close, in my opinion. Sonnet and Opus are still the best models. The Codex variants of the GPT models are also great. I've tried MiniMax, GLM, Qwen and Kimi and for anything even remotely complex these models seriously struggle.

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#103
post #102

Slightly off topic, but question for folks. I'm hoping to replace coding with Claude Sonnet 4.5 with a model with an open source or open weights model. Are any of the models on Ollama.com cloud offering ( https://ollama.com/search?c=cloud ) or any of the models on OpenRouter.ai a close replacement? I know that no model right now matches the full performance and capabilities of Claude Sonnet 4.5, but I want to know ho…

In short: no. Nothing comes close, in my opinion. Sonnet and Opus are still the best models. The Codex variants of the GPT models are also great. I've tried MiniMax, GLM, Qwen and Kimi and for anything even remotely complex these models seriously struggle.

Thank you for the honest answer.

Yes, this is the conclusion I've come to as well. I don't want to continue supporting OpenAI nor Anthropic, but the other models don't seem to be anywhere close yet, despite the hype.

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#104

Slightly off topic, but question for folks. I'm hoping to replace coding with Claude Sonnet 4.5 with a model with an open source or open weights model. Are any of the models on Ollama.com cloud offering ( https://ollama.com/search?c=cloud ) or any of the models on OpenRouter.ai a close replacement? I know that no model right now matches the full performance and capabilities of Claude Sonnet 4.5, but I want to know ho…

Yes GLM5 and KimiK2.5 are pretty close replacements for sonnet.

What coding harness are you using? What are some example workflows you have used either for? Have you used them only for new/simple projects or for more complicated refactoring or architecture design?

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#105

Slightly off topic, but question for folks. I'm hoping to replace coding with Claude Sonnet 4.5 with a model with an open source or open weights model. Are any of the models on Ollama.com cloud offering ( https://ollama.com/search?c=cloud ) or any of the models on OpenRouter.ai a close replacement? I know that no model right now matches the full performance and capabilities of Claude Sonnet 4.5, but I want to know ho…

Yes GLM5 and KimiK2.5 are pretty close replacements for sonnet.

Haven't really tried GLM5 much but I've used 4.7 quite a bit and it was pretty far from competing with Sonnet at the time, although I saw claims online to the contrary.

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#106

Huge Claude user here… can someone help me set some realistic expectations if I bought a Mac mini and spun one up? I use Claude primarily for dev work and Home Lab projects. Are the open models good enough to run locally and replace the Claude workload? Or am I better off with my $20/mo Claude subscription?

I've been playing with the open models since the original llama leak. They're getting better over time, are useful for tasks of moderate complexity and it's just cool to have a binary blob of knowledge that you can run locally without an internet connection.

However you should manage your expectations. Whatever the benchmarks say, you'll quickly realise they're not at all competing with Sonnet let alone Opus. Even the largest open weights models aren't really doing that.

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#108

Sorry for being off topic, but why can’t I open this without being logged into GitHub? I thought gists are either completely private or publicly accessible. Are they no longer publicly accessible?

In case anyone’s wondering, I tried it again and it worked this time, even without logging in. Maybe because this was my first visit to GitHub in a new country (I’m currently on vacation), I triggered some sort of anti-scraping measure or something.
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