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.
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.