Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

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/

I don't think you're going to get many "true" answers to this. The opportunity cost of not using the latest and best models is just too much right now.

Every month I research this and come to the same conclusion: the time, effort, and cost required to get local models (and the coding tools around them) to perform even close to Claude Code with sonnet/opus just not worth it right now. If it was, it would be distributive enough to be in the news.

Not that I'm discounting someone hasn't already solved this, just trying to Occam razor my way out of diving too deep down rabbit holes.

The problem with this question is that it encompasses a huge spectrum of capabilities and expectations. If you can only run an 8B model and expect it to be good at vibe coding / one shotting things you're going to have a bad time.

If you're able to run a model on the scale of ~30B, you can find that with a reasonably scoped and well defined task they do very well. I've found both Gemma4-31B and Qwen3.6-27B to be the best in this range at the moment. You can swap in the MoE models for faster inference, but they are noticeably worse at most tasks. They can one-shot / vibe code tasks with small scope, but still do much better with guidance.

If you really want frontier-like capabilities, you'll probably need at least 128GB of memory and either huge compute or a lot of patience. Most people just don't have either the money or the patience to make these local models work.

The patience required for local model usage goes far beyond just waiting for tokens though. It takes a lot of effort to get things configured and working properly for your workflow and hardware.

I would like to know whether someone was able to use lower tier models for activities other than coding e.g. a limited version of a personal note manager - and what the hardware requirements in RAM for these models were.

I have an optane and lots of ram, so I tried full-fat models for writing some function overnight, as I get about 0.7 t/s. My current go-to test is to update a scalar function to transpose a bit-matrix to one using avx512. the cloud models all play with that like its nothing. Kimi 2.6 and GLM 5.1 both failed miserably.

Not “local” and not interactive coding but sharing since it might be helpful. I have 2x RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell running DeepSeek V4 Flash. I get 160 tok/s raw but it’s a reasoning model. For my use case, I have it auto-write code and another system auto-review the code.

I occasionally use it with pi to write some code and it’s blazing fast but it’s mostly habit that keeps me with CC and Codex.

I've been wondering lately if it would help to take a medium sized model and either in cloud or some local setup actually do Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) on every prompt as a chore - I don't know if trying to manually finetune a model to your use habits would ruin it or help - ideally if you were diligent you could get rid of some of the ticks that make models for the general public difficult to work with e.g. overly sycophantic, overly verbose, annoying tendency to explain via analogies

but perhaps one individuals prompt feedback just isn't going to ever be enough I'm not sure how much you need (I know people working at big companies that have purchased in-house agents fine-tuned on internal documents etc.. and apparently these end up with bizarre behaviours not necessarily more helpful than the standard models)

I'd like to be able to essentially edit every response given by an agent and then finetune on the difference between what it produced and how I edited the text. Personally I would just remove a lot of the adjectives and try to distill the responses to core responses but I worry based on some of the work done by Owain Evans and other alignment researchers that this can sometimes push agents into tricky-to-predict tendancies.

There’s evidence that combining models can achieve frontier-level performance (e.g. OpenRouter Fusion). I’m wondering if that’s the more realistic option: combine Opus with a local model to save on token costs.

I work with a few models on servers, so not local, but self hosted with ollama. gemma-4, glm 4.7 flash, and qwen 3.6. glm is the best at coding agentically. But I still don't think any of them reach the levels of gpt 5.5 or opus 4.8.

Tried. The context windows just weren't big enough.

My experience is that it's not the models themselves that are limiting right now, it's the clunky alternative harnesses with weird missing features making for bad ergonomics around stuff like queue management, interruption, subagents, goals, etc.

I tried. It works in theory: https://blog.frankel.ch/tokensparsamkeit-coding-assistants/#...

Results depend on the model, of course, and your computer is the limit. Mine wasn't up to the task, unfortunately.

mbp16 m5 max 128gb, antirez/ds4, deepseekv4-flash. Works well for relatively dense (let's say <20k LoC per project) C codebases that are essentially a bunch of custom specialized stores, http servers, network infra, media transformers, etc.

Runs through Pi with a custom prompt (basically "don't speculate blindly, isolate things, make them traceable and measurable, then verify") and behind a pretty restrictive bwrap setup - RO bind everything other than ~/.pi, cdw and a separate tmpfs, unshare almost everything other than the network - for which I use a network namespace that only allows tcp connections to a specific ip and port (i.e the inference mac) - i.e. netns exec into bwrap.

Can't compare it to SOTA or higher-requirements models on what I work on - policy. That said, on a bunch of test pieces - it obviously isn't gpt-5.5, it definitely lags behind k2.6/glm/ds4-pro, but it absolutely is usable. Of course, on such codebases, forget about one-shotting or trusting it blindly or anything of the sort - you ask it, guide it, restart the context from time to time to have a "fresh dice roll" and to keep the context small and clean, etc. Compared to anything smaller (incl. all the usual local qwen models) - on a test piece, it figured out that memfd and mmap were used for setting up a ring buffer with natural wraparound handling (double mapping the first page at the end) and didn't tell me "this is for sharing memory between processes" or some other BS.

Performance as described in the tables in the readme here: https://github.com/antirez/ds4 ...with a bit less than half that at "low power" (30w). Both are usable.

Pretty good results with qwen 3.6 27b dense. I’d say it’s about equal to (Claude) haiku 4.5 maybe sonnet depending on the task.

It has so far been the kind of thing that always feels like the next version of the local models would be the one that is just good enough.

Not yet, tried Gemma 4 on an Apple M4 but the tok/s is significant lower than the cloud offering.

Also,the lack of enterprise tooling to help selected an appropriate model and tooling to run a local LLM does not help.

i used to mix remote and local minimax 2.7(q3) on my strix halo, it run at 30 tg and 220 tokens pp... it was a bit painful slow, but it was a good feeling i could stay offline. unfortunately m3 which is at opus .8 levels is 460b parameters and doesn't even fit in 128gb of memory, let alone a big context. strix halo feels like a toy for ai purposes. https://kyuz0.github.io/amd-strix-halo-toolboxes/

This was posted shortly after your Ask HN post:

My Homelab AI Dev Platform

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542433

I use Pi and Qwen 3.6 27b locally on a 4090 for all my personal projects. I still use Claude for day job work since they pay for it, and my employer expects me to use it. I rarely touch it otherwise.

Always a bit disappointed in the details in these kinds of threads. When you do get answers, they're never specific enough to try out on your own. It'll be something like "I use Qwen 3.5 and get great results!" OK but what quantization are you using? What llama parameters? What context size? What GPU are you running it on, and how much VRAM does it have? Are you hosting it on a separate box, or running it locally on your dev machine? What coding agent tool are you using, and how is it configured / hooked up to the model?

Related: Are there any viable distributed AI models?

Like how we've had SETI at Home, Folding at Home, BitTorrent etc. People are clearly willing to donate their computer resources to distributed projects.

Maybe in a dAI network anyone could submit content for training on, and each user running a "node" could have their own custom private conditions on which type of content to accept for training or inference.

Like someone who dislikes anime could say "never accept anime related content or queries" so their node would basically opt-out from any data or questions about anime.

Yes, running a local model on a natural wetware substrate here.

Recommended setup: plenty of nutrients, some caffeine and a quiet environment.

Performance - not currently measured in tokens: roughly average.

Waiting for this https://github.com/antirez/ds4 to stabilize for strix halo.

Until I can buy an 80GB VRAM GPU, I won't attempt to do it. A local LLM is always missing something that needs a bigger model.

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Just attach OpenRouter to your coding agent tool and try yourself. All relevant open weight models are there. Every person have different needs and expectations

Local? No. Via opencode Go subscription using GLM mainly? Yes, I still use Gemini/Claude/GPT via api from openrouter for adjacent tasks, I would say 20$ per month max in api token costs.

Disclaimer: I am a Linux infra/k8s guy, I write production code but it's mainly glue code and mainly in golang.

Addendum: most value we get is from "document intelligence" and that's all Gemma and Qwen on H100/H200