HACKER Q&A
📣 cloudking

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


Has anyone here fully swapped Claude/GPT for a local model as their main coding tool, not just for side experiments? If so, please share your setup and performance (e.g tok/s)


  👤 acc_297 Accepted Answer ✓
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.


👤 anonymousiam
This was posted shortly after your Ask HN post:

My Homelab AI Dev Platform

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


👤 arjie
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.


👤 _davide_
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/

👤 HappySweeney
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.

👤 ryandrake
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?

👤 K0balt
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.

👤 tumetab1
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.


👤 Razengan
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.


👤 dude250711
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.


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

👤 kertoip_1
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