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A guide to local coding models

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251–260 of 363 posts

Re: A guide to local coding models

#251
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

similar for me —- also how do you get the proper double dashes —- anyway, I’d love to be able to run CLI agents fully local, but I don’t see it being good enough (relative to what you can get for pretty cheap from SOTA models) anytime soon

What’s wrong with your keyboard haha

iphone :/ I see others with the same problem too, oh well, at least people won’t accuse me of being an LLM probably

Re: A guide to local coding models

#252
post #64

I hope hardware becomes so cheap local models become the standard.

It will be like the rest of computing, some things will move to the edge and others stay on the cloud. Best choice will depend on use cases.

> It will be like the rest of computing, some things will move to the edge and others stay on the cloud.

It will become like cloud computing - some people will have a cloud bill of $10k/m to host their apps, other people would run their app on a $15/m VPS.

Yes, the cost discrepancy will be as big as the current one we see in cloud services.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#253
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop recommending 3090s they are all but obsolete now. Not having native bf16 is a showstopper.

Hard disagree. The difference in performance is not something you'll notice if you actually use these cards. In AI benchmarks, the RTX 3090 beats the RTX 4080 SUPER, despite the latter having native BF16 support. 736GiB/s (4080) memory bandwidth vs 936 GiB/s (3090) plays a major role. Additionally, the 3090 is not only the last NVIDIA consumer card to support SLI. It's also unbeatable in price to performance as the n…

If you run fp32 maybe but no sane person does that. The tensor performance of the 3090 is also abysmal. If you run bf16 or fp8 stay away from obsolete cards. Its barely usable for llms and borderline garbage tier on video and image gen.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#254
post #203

I am still hoping, but for the moment… I have been trying every 30-80B model that came out in the last several months, with crush and opencode, and it's just useless. They do produce some output, but it's nowhere near the level that claude code gets me out of the box. It's not even the same league. With LLMs, I feel like price isn't the main factor: my time is valuable, and a tool that doesn't improve the way I work…

I use Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2-Codex through VS Code all day long, and the closest I've come is Devstral-Small-2-24B-Instruct-2512 inferring on a DGX Spark hosting with vLLM as an "Open AI Compatible" API endpoint I use to power the Cline VS Code extension.

It works, but it's slow. Much more like set it up and come back in an hour and it's done. I am incredibly impressed by it. There are quantized GGUFs and MLXs of the 123B, which can fit on my M3 36GB Macbook that I haven't tried yet.

But overall, it feels about about 50% too slow, which blows my mind because we are probably 9 months away from a local model that is fast and good enough for my script kiddie work.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#255

Here's my take on it though... Just as we had the golden era of the internet in the late 90s, when the WWW was an eden of certificate-less homepages with spinning skulls on geocities without ad tracking, we are now in the golden era of agentic coding where massive companies make eye watering losses so we can use models without any concerns. But this won't last and Local Llamas will become a compelling idea to use, pa…

Yep, when the tide goes away no company will be able to keep swimming naked offering stuff for free

Re: A guide to local coding models

#256

Here's my take on it though... Just as we had the golden era of the internet in the late 90s, when the WWW was an eden of certificate-less homepages with spinning skulls on geocities without ad tracking, we are now in the golden era of agentic coding where massive companies make eye watering losses so we can use models without any concerns. But this won't last and Local Llamas will become a compelling idea to use, pa…

Yes. This heavily subsidized LLM inference usage will not last forever.

We have already seen cost cutting for some models. A model starts strong, but over time the parent company switches to heavily quantized versions to save on compute costs.

Companies are bleeding money, and eventually this will need to adjust, even for a behemoth like Google.

That is why running local models is important.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#257
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have inference running on this new 128GB RAM Mac, wouldn't you still need another separate machine to do the manual work (like running IDE, browsers, toolchains, builders/bundlers etc.)? I can not imagine you will have any meaningful RAM available after LLM models are running.

No? First of all you can limit how much of the unified RAM goes into VRAM, and second, many applications don't need that much RAM. Even if you put 108 GB to VRAM and 16 to applications, you'll be fine.

How about the rest of the resources? CPU/GPU? Would your work not be affected by inference running?

Re: A guide to local coding models

#258
post #4

> I realized I looked at this more from the angle of a hobbiest paying for these coding tools. Someone doing little side projects—not someone in a production setting. I did this because I see a lot of people signing up for $100/mo or $200/mo coding subscriptions for personal projects when they likely don’t need to. Are people really doing that? If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans fr…

Claude's $20 plan should be renamed to "trial". Try Opus and you will reach your limit in 10 minutes. With Sonnet, if you aren't clearing the context very often, you'll hit it within a few hours. I'm sympathetic to developers who are using this as their only AI subscription because while I was working on a challenging bug yesterday I reached the limit before it had even diagnosed the problem and had to switch to anot…

Gemini 3 on Gemini CLI (free version) would meet quota limit for about 3-4 messages, but it will take much longer time since it responses pretty slow.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#259
I recently found myself wanting to use Claude Code and Codex-CLI with local LLMs on my MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB. This setup can make sense for cost/privacy reasons and for non-coding tasks like writing, summarization, q/a with your private notes etc.

I found the instructions for this scattered all over the place so I put together this guide to using Claude-Code/Codex-CLI with Qwen3-30B-A3B, 80B-A3B, Nemotron-Nano and GPT-OSS spun up with Llama-server:

https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/blob/main/do...

Llama.cpp recently started supporting Anthropic’s messages API for some models, which makes it really straightforward to use Claude Code with these LLMs, without having to resort to say Claude-Code-Router (an excellent library), by just setting the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL.

Re: A guide to local coding models

#260
post #179

So I can't see bothering with this when I pumped 260M tokens through running in Auto mode on a $20/mo Cursor plan. It was my first month of a paid subscription, if that means anything. Maybe someone can explain how this works for them? Frankly, I don't understand it at all, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

> So I can't see bothering with this when I pumped 260M tokens through running in Auto mode on a $20/mo Cursor plan. It was my first month of a paid subscription, if that means anything. Maybe someone can explain how this works for them?

They're running at a loss and covering up the losses using VC?

> Frankly, I don't understand it at all, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I think that the providers are going to wait until there are a significant number of users that simply cannot function in any way without the subscription, and then jack up the prices.

After all, I can all but guarantee that even the senior devs at most places now won't be able to function if every single tool or IDE provided by a corporate (like VSCode) was yanked from them.

Myself, you can scrub my main dev desktop of every corporate offering, and I might not even notice (emacs or neovim, plugins like Slime, Lsp plugins, etc) is what I am using daily, along with programming languages.

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