A Guide to Local Coding Models

[Revised] You Don’t Need to Spend $100/mo on Claude Code: Your Guide to Local Coding Models What you need to know about local model tooling and the steps for setting one up yourself [Edit 1] This article has been edited after initial release for clarity. Both the tl;dr and the end section have added information. [Edit 2] This hypothesis was actually wrong and thank you to everyone who commented! Here’s a full explanation of where I went wrong. I want to address this mistake as I realize it might have a meaningful impact on someone's financial position. I’m not editing the actual article except where absolutely necessary so it doesn’t look like I’m covering up the mistake-I want to address it. Instead, I’ve included the important information below. There is one takeaway this article provides that definitely holds true: Local models are far more capable than they’re given credit for, even for coding. It also explains the process of setting up a local coding model and technical information about doing so which is helpful for anyone wanting to set up a local coding model. I would still recommend doing so. But do I want someone reading this to immediately drop their coding subscription and buy a maxed out MacBook Pro? No, and for that reason I need to correct my hypothesis from ‘Yes, with caveats’ to ‘No’. This article was not an empirical assessment, but should have been to make these claims. Here’s where I went wrong: While local models can likely complete ~90% of the software development tasks that something like Claude Code can, the last 10% is the most important. When it comes to your job, that last 10% is worth paying more for to get that last bit of performance. I realized I looked at this more from the angle of a hobbiest paying for these coding tools. Someone doing little side projects-not someone in a production setting. I did this because I see a lot of people signing up for $100/mo or $200/mo coding subscriptions for personal projects when they likely don’t need to. I would not recommend running local models as a company instead of giving employees access to a tool like Claude Code. While larger local models are very capable, as soon as you run other development tools (Docker, etc.) that also eat into your RAM, your model needs to be much smaller and becomes a lot less capable. I didn’t factor this in in my experiment. So, really, the takeaway should be that these are incredible supplemental models to frontier models when coding and could potentially save you on your subscription by dropping it down a tier, but practically they’re not worth the effort in situations that might affect your livelihood. Exactly a month ago, I made a hypothesis: Instead of paying $100/mo+ for an AI coding subscription, my money would be better spent upgrading my hardware so I can run local coding models at a fraction of the price (and have better...

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