Vibe coders out here thinking all software development is solved by because they made an (ugly and unoriginal) dashboard for their SaaS clone and their single column with 3x3 feature card landing page thats identical to every other vibe coders "startup"
As much fun as it is to run these things locally don’t forget that your time is not free. I am slowly migrating my use cases to openrouter and run the largest qwen model for < $2-3/day with serious use for personal projects.
I have a brand new M5 MacBook Pro - top end with all the specs and I've tried local models and they're barely functional.
How long do people realistically expect a laptop to stay competitive with SOTA local models? Especially in a space where model sizes, context windows, and inference requirements keep moving every year.
And even if the hardware lasts, the local experience usually doesn’t. A heavily quantized local model running at tolerable speeds on consumer hardware is still nowhere near frontier hosted models in reasoning, coding, multimodal capability, tool use, or reliability.
The economics just don’t make sense to me unless you specifically need offline inference, privacy guarantees, or low latency for a niche workflow. Otherwise you’re tying up $10k upfront to run an approximation of what you can already access through a subscription that continuously improves over time.
You could literally put the difference into index funds and probably cover the subscription indefinitely from the returns alone, even accounting for gradual price increases.
But the are interesting and fun to play with! I do a LOT of work on local agent harnesses etc, mostly for fun.
My current project is a zero install agent: https://gemma-agent-explainer.nicklothian.com/ - Python, SQL and React all run completely in browser. Gemma E4B is recommended for the best experience!
This is under heavy development, needs Chrome for both HTML5 Filesystem API support and LiteRT (although most Chromium based browsers can be made to work with it)
It's different to most agents because it is zero install: the model runs in the browser using LiteRT/LiteLLM (which gives better performance than Transformers.js), and Filesystem API gives it optional sandbox access to a directory to read from.
It is self documenting - you can ask questions like "How is the system prompt used" in the live help pane and it has access to its own source code.
There's quite a lot there: press "Tour" to see it all.
Will be open source next week.
I dont mean this about you, you seem to realize its mostly useless, but most the people on HN be acting like all software development can be done by a local model and the end of SOTA is around the corner.
I think that the more people who try local models (especially the larger ones) the better.
I sometimes get the impression that many people claiming that local models are as good as frontier models work in "token poor" environments. If you can't build large-scale programs using at least Opus 4.5+ then it's difficult to compare. They compare something like Qwen 27B with Sonnet and see that it is nearly as good, but miss that the frontier models are a lot better.
That knowledge is power, too.
I personally can help making local models more accessible. I can't make Opus cheaper.
I consider Gemma 4 31B (dense / no MoE), the new baseline for local models. It's obviously worse than the frontier models, but it feels less like a science experiment than any previous local model I’ve run, including GPT OSS 120B and Nemotron Super 120B.
On my M5 Max with 128 GB of RAM and the full 256K context window, I see RAM use spike to about 70 GB, with something like 14 GB of system overhead. A 64 GB Panther Lake machine with the full Arc B390, or a 48 GB Snapdragon X2 Elite machine, could probably run it with a 128K to 256K context window.
Even a few years ago, seeing this kinda performance on a mainstream-ish/plus configuration would have seemed like a pipe dream.
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