[pierotofy]

Yes. Llama.cpp + Qwen3.6-35b (MTP) + OpenCode is quite capable and runs on a single RTX 3090 and is faster than most cloud models. Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago. Setup details at https://github.com/pierotofy/LocalCodingLLM/

[jacobgold]

"Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago."

That sounds great for hobbyists but IMHO it wasn't until Opus 4.6 was released six months go (Dec 25, 2025) that we had a model good enough for professionals to use as a primary driver of their coding agents. That seems to be the threshold worth aiming for.

[sbrother]

I strongly agree on that being the release where these tools got good enough to substantially speed up my professional work. I have to admit I was super skeptical of AI coding until then.

[deaux]

Your skepticism led you to underrate the usefulness until then. Those who have been using agentic coding for the last 2 years can tell you Opus 4.6 was not a step change in quality, it was mostly a step change in the Overton Window and narrative.

[dnautics]

for me (might be because of the language im using) i had a substantial bump around september and a huge bump around January.

in my stuff now i use an OT library that claude put finishing touches on in September.

[storus]

You can already get Opus 4.6 level of performance on subtasks with some local models. So you need to pick a proper code writer, plan writer, code tester etc. model that matches your target expectations and use a coding tool that allows calling different LLMs for different subtasks. For example, people use StepFun 3.x or DeepSeek4-Flash for planning, Qwen3.6-27B for coding.

[kelnos]

Not sure what you mean by "primary driver", but I was finding even Sonnet quite useful for coding tasks, even about 12-14 months ago (I was too cheap to pay more than $20/month back then, and Opus hit my limits too quickly).

Certainly I get a ton more value out of Opus today, but I could absolutely see someone deciding to limit themselves to 8-to-12-months-ago Opus performance for privacy (or other) reasons.

[Projectiboga]

So thalen it might be 6-8 months to get to useable on a local open model? Of course state of the art will be a year ahead, a generation at the current pace.

[alexandra_au]

You have your dates and models wrong, it was Opus 4.5 released in November 2025, that changed everything, Opus 4.6 was released in February 2026.

[jacobgold]

You're right. December is when things felt differnt but Opus 4.5 was actually released November 24, 2025.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5

[pierotofy]

I use it for work.

[jacobgold]

That's cool if you prefer it, but it is hard to imagine it being a strictly rational choice when much better quality is available at a price that is small relative to the cost of an employee. Or is there something specific about your use-case?

[vector_spaces]

Not all work requires every facet to be so sharply optimized, and there may be other constraints that are completely invisible to you. Some that were easy for me to imagine: the parent works in a heavily regulated industry, their IT team is slow-moving and paranoid and this is a safe, under-the-radar workaround, the output is "good enough" for their purposes and they find tinkering with it to be fun.

Regardless I don't think it's fruitful to be so condescending with such little insight into this person's situation. Even if you had total insight -- let people be and withhold your judgement, or at least keep it to yourself. Making people feel stupid is a great way to turn people off to pretty much anything else you have to say

[pierotofy]

To me, what's not rational is believing you must rent the tools of your trade while exposing all of your employer's intellectual property to a third party. Difference of opinion.

[jacobgold]

It's not my opinion that you "must" rent tools but it certainly is the pragmatic choice in 2026. I would be as happy as anyone for this situation to change and I expect it to at some point.

[lokar]

Won’t it depend on what you use it for? A less capable system might be fine for boilerplate, moderate re-factoring, etc. Not everyone is building whole features in one go.

[epolanski]

Why don't you people bother to try instead of chasing the latest shiny thing?

You must be the type of crowd that writes websites with React and Tailwind and pretend to be engineers and have an opinion on everything.

[trueno]

i have a 128gb m4 max macbook pro i've been wanting to tinker with this stuff but genuinely never find the time. any mac users in here running similar to the above that can share their experience?

i always see great debates with local stuff but the space is constantly moving goalposts and all the vernacular is pretty unfamiliar to me. i'd love to understand what people with objective experience feel they've traded away (or gained) when going local so i can determine for myself if these things are a good fit.

[brycesub]

If you have a 128GB Mac you really ought to try out: https://github.com/antirez/ds4 by the creator of redis. This is probably as close to it gets to state-of-the-art local LLM + agentic coding.

[__mharrison__]

Using this just this morning on my DGX Spark. A little slower than frontier models but my $200/mo weekly usage exhausted with 3 days left on the week...

(Shouldn't have done that refactoring job in high mode)

[trueno]

well this is supremely interesting thanks for putting it on my radar

[lostlogin]

Thank you.

[htrp]

Use your ClaudeCode sub and tell it to set it up for you

[dirkolbrich]

I have the same machine. You might look into https://omlx.ai/ a „macOS-native MLX server“. pi.dev for the agent with MCP, web-search and sub-agents extension.

[lelandbatey]

I use it, it's good, I get work done, but know that they really mean it when they say

> "Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago"

Don't expect Opus, expect more like Haiku. If you micromanage it, you'll get great results. If you want it to be a human in a box, it'll flounder.

[atomicnumber3]

Same. I have no desire to use Claude at all anymore.

[pierotofy]

Yep. Screw Anthropic, CloseAI and all other rent seekers in this space.

[akulbe]

I have an M2 Max MBP with 96GB of RAM. What models and setup would you use for this kind of configuration?

[monirmamoun]

download LM Studio to play with, and it will let you search for models... try Qwen3.6-35B-A3B at 4,5 or 6 bits (6 bit XL is near perfect) and use pi coder or another harness to access it... you can also try Unsloth studio and try same model to start. LM Studio slighter easier to use, Unsloth probably better quality. Neither one is super great quality by the way (meaning: they crash or act weirdly too often to be full production solutions, but can work for local coding). ONCE YOU DOWNLOAD EITHER APP... it will let you search huggingface for the models. Just type qwen to start looking and ... start messing around. And you connect the pi coder harness using the http interface that LM Studio and Unsloth offer to the engine API, so make sure you figure out that url and turn it on... something like 127.0.0.1:1234/api would be a typical IP (localhost) and port (1234 is used by LM Studio)

[dheera]

Am I doing something wrong or has ollama become shittified?

I'm looking at https://ollama.com/search and the top few models like kimi-k2.7-code say "cloud" and I can't seem to ollama pull them.

I thought the whole POINT of ollama was not-cloud?

[hoherd]

I experienced the same situation a month or two ago. One of my friends sent me this article that was illuminating. https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/

[satvikpendem]

Ollama is not recommended to be used. Use llama.cpp.

[jmorgan]

The larger models are available on Ollama's cloud as most folks don't have the hardware to run 500B-1T parameter models.

[jubilanti]

> I thought the whole POINT of ollama was not-cloud?

It was at first, then the developers realized they had a massive userbase they could monetize. A tale as old as open source...

[toyg]

Yes, you've nailed it. Ollama are desperately trying to pull a Cursor - like 3791 other projects in this space.

[daveidol]

Do you do your dev work on the windows machine (referenced in the docs), or do you remotely access it from a separate machine? I ask because I have a RTX 3090 kicking around in a gaming desktop, but I don't use it for any dev work (I use a Macbook Pro).

[snake_n_my_boot]

I have a similar set up and have been using it to learn and tinker with open models. I run Ollama on the gaming desktop and point OpenCode to it from my MacBook. Works nicely for me so far.

[NamlchakKhandro]

don't waste your time with windows.

[dominotw]

how much does the setup cost if i want to buy all the hardware now and increased power costs?