[dabockster]

The Chinese models like Deepseek R1 and the Qwen Coder series have been way better at coding than any of the western models. And they're open source, too.

32 billion sized R1 and Qwen models blow GPT, Gemini, and Claude out of the water for coding tasks usually. And they can be made to run on a standard gaming PC off the shelf from somewhere like Best Buy or Costco. They will run really really slowly, though, but they will run.