[gruez]

>I can get the same computing power out of a single Mac Mini 32 GB that I get from from an AWS virtual machine that costs hundreds of dollars per month.

This quickly breaks down when you're talking about large models that needs terabytes of memory to run[1]. There's no way that you're going to be able to amortize that for a single person.

[1] https://apxml.com/models/glm-51

[ipaddr]

The comment is about smaller models

[gruez]

Right, but what are you going to do with small models? If your time is worth anything at all you'd pay for the $100 claude code/codex pro subscription, rather than fumbling around with the models quantized enough to fit on your mac.

[mhitza]

If you're building agentic processes (harnesses) for business processes local models are a great way to do that, while keeping your data, and any personal data, private.

If you're vibe coding a codex/claude subscription makes more sense as a more polished experience.

I don't vibe code, but I use self hosted models with codex for code review and snippet generation.

[ret32f]

If small models keep improving for specific purposes and larger models have diminishing returns, then what?

E.g. I can see a world where you have a local model that is specialised just for producing code.

[20after4]

$100 isn't going to buy you much access to claude code when they start charging a profitable fee for using it.