Another update for codex users they let you accumulate resets which greatly adds to the mileage
I don't think its feasible to have something comparable to these frontier models when they are increasing usage and lowering token costs
AI coding at home without going broke
21–30 of 321 posts
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#22For me, investing in hardware seems to be the way to go. I learned coding nearly 24 years ago and still learning new stuff all the time. At no point in time I had to rely on a subscription model to learn and do new stuff. If LLM and agents are the default tools for coding and building software, at least for next few years, it seems like a no-brainer to invest $2000-3000 on hardware, like a Halo Strix PC.
Yes and no. Hardware does lock you in. Granted, I am happy with my 128gb of shared memory, but I am mildly concerned that it actually is more expensive now than when I bought mine. It does not bode well for the future; not when combined with recent WH admin moves on Anthropic and the reality that next batch of good models may require more than 128gb to run well.
edit: I am not dismissing local. I am one such user ( though I have subs too ), but one has to be clear eyed about the trade-offs.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#23Can I run something comparable to Opus 4.6 locally yet? I keep hearing conflicting things. If I can spend 10k to do that I would cancel my subscription. The problem is I don’t wanna spend the money to find out myself.
10k will not get you anywhere near opus or sonnet.
It's simply not possible for mere mortals currently.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#24Can I run something comparable to Opus 4.6 locally yet? I keep hearing conflicting things. If I can spend 10k to do that I would cancel my subscription. The problem is I don’t wanna spend the money to find out myself.
> Can I run something comparable to Opus 4.6 locally yet?
Sadly, no. The best comparable thing you can get is about Sonnet 3.7
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#25Fixed-price monthly plans ought to be sufficient for most people who actually review their spec and code, for building production-grade software that stand the test of time. A careful spec+review+iteration takes time, resetting the usage quota. Granted, security audits uses tokens too. If you still need more tokens, odds that you're vibecoding unmaintainable throwaway trash.
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Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#26> The first is to self host. You buy the machine, run open source models locally, and pay nothing per token after that. Power is not free. What I’ve found is that you’re basically paying a premium for privacy, and that’s worth it for me.
Actually if you have solar, it kind of is.. so prIvAt AI compute gets defacto cheaper during the day?
If you have solar, it is not, because you have battery and equipment degradation from cycle charging, c’mon man…
I would agree with you if you said it was vastly cheaper overall (with the initial equipment investment amortized over time) compared to The Power Company.
In many states, even if you are generating electricity and selling it back to the power company, they still gonna charge you normal rates of usage because greed.
If you go off grid, you have bigger things to worry about than how to power your AI cluster. It’s manageable enough if you have land but that’s in scarce supply.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#27Can I run something comparable to Opus 4.6 locally yet? I keep hearing conflicting things. If I can spend 10k to do that I would cancel my subscription. The problem is I don’t wanna spend the money to find out myself.
If you want frontier-level, the economically reasonable option is OpenRouter or a direct sub to frontier-of-your-choice.
The reality is that they do not offer configurations that would allow a consumer to run that much VRAM on a single setup to protect datacenter margins. Apple used to, and they stopped, those devices are going for ~$20k+ each on ebay now.
You can get very, very capable models on a 3090/4090/5090/6000 series card. But if you want 'frontier level' you are investing ~22k at a bare minimum if you go new. Used you can probably build your own server for much cheaper up-front cost but it's likely going to be 4-6x+ electricity usage.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#28I think someone could find some way to use the smaller local models to write code. Some kind of framework or harness or language or something. But not too many people are working on that because the big models are pretty cheap and a lot better.
Maybe one possible path(to make weaker models highly capable) is making the job of the llm as easy as possible.
I wonder if part of the solution is building/finding the right libraries, with the right documentation/language/API(one that plays well with LLM's) and maybe creating some synthetic data around them - to make it very easy for the llm.
And maybe there could be a business model around creating those libraries.
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#29[deleted]
Re: AI coding at home without going broke
#30I recently made an AI Agent and surprisingly coding with DeepSeek V4 Flash is quite cheap. It probably has to do with the aggressive prompt caching. I'm using OpenRouter with Novita AI as the preferred provider.
Same here, deepseek v4 flash on opencode go. It's cheap, fats and good enough to follow my instructions
I’m using zen because I have a Claude subscription and just like dabbling with the other models and I was shocked at how little flash cost but it was noticeably not at the level I’d like my model to be.
For me MiniMax 3 has really hit the sweet spot of being very cheap, though more than flash, but I’d also very capable.