[kowbell]

> And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway.

I'm very interested in Local LLMs but the cheapest Mac Studio right now is more expensive than 8 years of a Claude Code Pro subscription, and incomparably slower/less capable. If I get bored with it, I will have a piece of unused hardware and a couple grand less in my bank account.

[binary0010]

I have opencode with qwen 3.6 on my local machine. Just get the setup right and it's surprisingly fun to work with.

[kowbell]

I had a ton of fun setting up and trying it out locally (also opencode and one of the qwens.) I still don't have hardware powerful enough to feel like it's meaningfully productive, but all the learning I had to do (and all the bonus things I got curious about as the curtain peeled back) got my nerd brain all worked up, and finally seeing it work was exciting in that cool-new-experience way you don't often get to enjoy :)

[binary0010]

Yeah this is exactly how I felt! Never really felt excited about llms or agentic workflows before. Getting everything setup 100% local and tweaking it to exactly what I want and having it actually working quite well has been a really cool experience.

[cyanydeez]

AMD 395+ w/128gb is all you need. the idea that mac studio is the default is a nerdfest.

[kowbell]

I admittedly haven't done a ton of research lately on AI capable PC hardware because of how nuts prices are right now, so I might be missing something...

...but all the AMD 395+ machines I can find are even more expensive than the aforementioned cheapest Mac Studio. Mac Studio starts at $2,000 (only 32GB), AMD 395+ 128GB machines seem to start at $3,000 from what I can see.

[cyanydeez]

the QWEN-3.5-CODER-NEXT fits in half the 128GB and the rest for context. with the right plugins, particularly context pruning, ive got it running over night by writing plans then implementing.

i do not know if theres a smaller model with same capability, but model size and context window at 128 seems like a sweet spot.

token speed really isnt a bother because im either just multitasking or working on the filling in the missing details.

regardless, i think comparing first VRAM sizes w/target model then speed for your cost efficiency. plus, a healthy skepticism of mac hardware costs.

[politelemon]

If you already have a gaming pc, then it's worth exploring as the cost of boredom is negligible.

[kowbell]

I did tinker a lil with mine! RTX3080 with 10GB VRAM, 5600x with 64GB DDR4 - not very good but it was very fun and exciting to tinker with :)

My partner on the otherhand has an M3 Max 64GB which I've had way more success with. Setting up opencode and doing a tiny spec-driven Rust project and watching it kiiinda work was extraordinarily exciting!