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 to drive their coding agent. That seems to be the threshold worth aiming for.

> "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.

I replaced a $100/m subscription to claude in favor of running pi harness pointed at unsloth studio, using both qwen (unsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MTP-GGUF) and gemma (unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF) models, depending on my mood.

I have a machine I built about 5 years ago with dual RTX3090s in it (I was going to build a new gaming machine anyways, and the llama release had just dropped so I tacked another used 3090 onto the build), and I get ~150tok/s on either of those models (at UD-Q4_K_XL quant) and can use the entire 300k context length without having to exit VRAM.

To be very clear - it's not as good as claude. But it's free and not so much worse that it matters significantly.

For my personal needs, free beats $100/m.

I also have an openclaw instance pointed at the same inference server, and it's great for that (genuinely solid use-case for local models).

Some example projects

- Replacement launcher for android tvs (with usage monitoring and tracking for kids)

- Custom admin portals for my k8s cluster services

- Custom home assistant integrations/automations (recently some shelly devices for power monitoring and switching)

- Grocery list management and meal planning (mostly via openclaw)

- some custom workflows for 3d asset generation in comfyui.

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Long story short, if you're trying to make money via software... I'd probably still recommend using a paid provider. But the local models are very capable of cool stuff.

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 don't think I'd be using AI to code at all if this weren't the case. (I don't want to feel stunted or stuck just from losing my internet connection.)

Qwen running on my 1st GPU at q4@176k context from 70 to 50 tok/s with MTP, pretty good for coding.

Gemma on the other hand is using both GPUs, running q8@64k context, doing document sentiment analysis, summarization, proofreading and translating, at consistent 25 tok/s. Somewhat slow but usable for batched workflows. Might get some more once llama.cpp starts supporting MTP with tensor split mode.

Still using frontier LLMs at dayjob since I'm not paying it and those are obviously better. Hopefully we'll have a Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.5 level 30B model in a year or so.

I have way too much VRAM forme such a model but Qwen never released the 122B version of Qwen3.6, which is the best class of model for my hardware. But at the same time my electricity bill is negligible, this is originally a laptop chip and it shows, it consumes almost nothing while idle and a little above 120W during prompt processing.

And Qwen3.6 has been surprisingly effective for me, I still use Clause occasionally but only for like 10% of my needs which allows me to stay well under the quota even with the cheapest plan.

Speed: ~800tps prompt processing and 50tps for token generation (with no speculative decoding).

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.

I think it strongly remains to be seen whether e.g. tokens per second (multiplied or whatever by percieved quality of private model) actually means "better or more useful output."

I strongly suspect it does not. (though I also strongly suspect this will be very difficult to measure because the incentive to lie about metrics here will be so strong.)

Probably the biggest improvement was including a backend-for-agents service definition which instructed the schema agent they were to only produce only a manifest based on the task, and to pass off that off to the next agent.

In short, I split tasks up into many pieces by defining a workflow where agents are only allowed to do very specific things before their work is passed along. This keeps them grounded and capable while also creating places for me to intervene if a workflow was say 25% or 90% successful.

I'm still optimizing it (with claude, to be clear), but my testing is very encouraging. I worry a lot about companies (and the government) controlling access to machine intelligence, so local is the way to go.

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 used the cli agents for claude, cursor, and pi, plus several custom harnesses I've written myself from time to time as experiments (and I guess technically gastown, if we're calling that a harness).

Pi is... just fine.

It does what I need it to, has a decent selection of tooling out of the box, integrates nicely with other tools, and generally gets out of my way enough that I don't think about it much anymore.

If you can run ~30b models at decent speeds, I think most folks would be pleasantly surprised at how capable they are with pi.

Tack on some of the extensions (ex https://pi.dev/packages/pi-mcp-adapter?name=mcp and https://pi.dev/packages/pi-web-access?name=search) and I get web tooling (ex - perplexity search), access to mcps to do things like drive chrome (https://browsermcp.io/) or firefox (https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-devtools-mcp)

It's fine. Is it as good as a subsidized top tier model? Nope. Is it free and still very capable? Yup.

And personally, I've been having a LOT of fun with the pi sdk (https://pi.dev/docs/latest/sdk)

Which is something that all the other providers charge you api access rates for (ex - thousands a month).

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

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.

About Owain Evans work: I think he did SFT. On Twitter someone was saying that RL is not as susceptible to what he showed. I'd like to try that

It’s slower but you can run them.

Sure, you can get the local models to generate plausibly-looking code for simple cases. But compared to how I solve complex design problems in a large codebase with Claude Code and Opus/Fable, this isn't worth my time.

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.

My Homelab AI Dev Platform

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

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

I think it also helps that I'm using my machine to do home server stuff. It excels at all of the traditional workloads. Then I can lean on the AI to help with automation here and there. I find it deeply satisfying.

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.

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