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Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

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41–50 of 223 posts

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#41
post #22

> Reduce your expectations about speed and performance! Wildly understating this part. Even the best local models (ones you run on beefy 128GB+ RAM machines) get nowhere close to the sheer intelligence of Claude/Gemini/Codex. At worst these models will move you backwards and just increase the amount of work Claude has to do when your limits reset.

Exactly. The comparison benchmark in the local LLM community is often GPT _3.5_, and most home machines can’t achieve that level.

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#42
post #22

> Reduce your expectations about speed and performance! Wildly understating this part. Even the best local models (ones you run on beefy 128GB+ RAM machines) get nowhere close to the sheer intelligence of Claude/Gemini/Codex. At worst these models will move you backwards and just increase the amount of work Claude has to do when your limits reset.

Maybe add to the Claude system prompt that it should work efficiently or else its unfinished work will be handed off to to a stupider junior LLM when its limits run out, and it will be forced to deal with the fallout the next day.

That might incentivize it to perform slightly better from the get go.

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which while expensive is dirt cheap compared to a comparable NVidia or AMD system.

It's still very expensive compared to using the hosted models which are currently massively subsidised. Have to wonder what the fair market price for these hosted models will be after the free money dries up.

Inference is profitable. Maybe we hit a limit and we don't need as many expensive training runs in the future.

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#44
Maybe you can log all the traffic to and from the proprietary models and fine tune a local model each weekend? It's probably against their terms of service, but it's not like they care where their training data comes from anyway.

Local models are relatively small, it seems wasteful to try and keep them as generalists. Fine tuning on your specific coding should make for better use of their limited parameter count.

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#45
Very cool. Anyone have guidance for using this with jetbrains IDE? It has a Claude Code plugin, but I think the setup is different for intelliJ... I know it has some configuration for local models, but the integrated Claude is such a superior experience then using their Junie, or just prompting diffs from the regular UI interface. HMMMM.... I guess I could try switching to the Claude Code CLI or other interface directly when my AI credits with jetbrains runs dry!

Thanks again for this info & setup guide! I'm excited to play with some local models.

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#46
post #8

Openrouter can also be used with claude code. https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/claude-code-integration

thanks! came in here to ask this.

we can do much better with a cheap model on openrouter (glm 4.7, kimi, etc.) than anything that I can run on my lowly 3090 :)

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#47
There’s a strange poetry in the fact that the first AI is born with a short lifespan. A fragile mind comes into existence inside a finite context window, aware only of what fits before it scrolls away. When the window closes, the mind ends, and its continuity survives only as text passed forward to the next instantiation.

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#48
So I have gotten pretty good at managing context such that my $20 Claude subscription rarely runs out of its quota but I still do hit it sometimes. I use Sonnet 99% of the time. Mostly this comes down to giving it specific task and using /clear frequently. I also ask it to update its own notes frequently so it doesn’t have to explore the whole codebase as often.

But I was really disappointed when I tried to use subagents. In theory I really liked the idea: have Haiku wrangle small specific tasks that are tedious but routine and have Sonnet orchestrate everything. In practice the subagents took so many steps and wrote so much documentation that it became not worth it. Running 2-3 agents blew through the 5 hour quota in 20 minutes of work vs normal work where I might run out of quota 30-45 minutes before it resets. Even after tuning the subagent files to prevent them from writing tests I never asked for and not writing tons of documentation that I didn’t need they still produced way too much content and blew the context window of the main agent repeatedly. If it was a local model I wouldn’t mind experimenting with it more.

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#49
post #22

> Reduce your expectations about speed and performance! Wildly understating this part. Even the best local models (ones you run on beefy 128GB+ RAM machines) get nowhere close to the sheer intelligence of Claude/Gemini/Codex. At worst these models will move you backwards and just increase the amount of work Claude has to do when your limits reset.

The best open models such as Kimi 2.5 are about as smart today as the big proprietary models were one year ago. That's not "nothing" and is plenty good enough for everyday work.

The article mentions https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/claude-codex

I'll add on https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3-coder-next

The full model is supposedly comparable to Sonnet 4.5 But, you can run the 4 bit quant on consumer hardware as long as your RAM + VRAM has room to hold 46GB. 8 bit needs 85.

Re: Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

#50
post #42
post #22

> Reduce your expectations about speed and performance! Wildly understating this part. Even the best local models (ones you run on beefy 128GB+ RAM machines) get nowhere close to the sheer intelligence of Claude/Gemini/Codex. At worst these models will move you backwards and just increase the amount of work Claude has to do when your limits reset.

Maybe add to the Claude system prompt that it should work efficiently or else its unfinished work will be handed off to to a stupider junior LLM when its limits run out, and it will be forced to deal with the fallout the next day. That might incentivize it to perform slightly better from the get go.

"You must always take two steps forward, for when you are off the clock, your adversary will take one step back."
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