> 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.
Are people really doing that?
If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans from OpenAI and Anthropic. The OpenAI one in particular is a great deal, because Codex is charged a whole lot lower than Claude.
The time to cough up $100 or $200/month is when you've exhausted your $20/month quota and you are frustrated at getting cut off. At that point you should be able to make a responsible decision by yourself.
Me. Currently using Claude Max for personal coding projects. I've been on Claude's $20 plan and would run out of tokens. I don't want to give my money to OpenAI. So far these projects have not returned their value back to me, but I am viewing it as an investment in learning best pratices with these coding tools.
It really depends. When building a lot of new features it happens quite fast. With some attention to context length I was often able to go for over an hour on the 20$ claude plan.
If you're doing mostly smaller changes, you can go all day with the 20$ Claude plan without hitting the limits. Especially if you need to thoroughly review the AI changes for correctness, instead of relying on automated tests.
I’ve been using vs code copilot pro for a few months and never really had any issue, once you hit the limit for one model, you generally still have a bunch more models to choose from. Unless I was vibe coding massive amounts of code without looking to testing, it’s hard to imagine I will run out of all the available pro models.
> If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans from OpenAI and Anthropic.
> The time to cough up $100 or $200/month is when you've exhausted your $20/month quota and you are frustrated at getting cut off. At that point you should be able to make a responsible decision by yourself.
These are the same people, by and large. What I have seen is users who purely vibe code everything and run into the limits of the $20/m models and pay up for the more expensive ones. Essentially they're trading learning coding (and time, in some cases, it's not always faster to vibe code than do it yourself) for money.
If this is the new way code is written then they are arguably learning how to code. Jury is still out though, but I think you are being a bit dismissive.
And as a hobbyist the time to sign up for the $20/month plan is after you've spent $20 on tokens at least a couple times.
YMMV based on the kinds of side projects you do, but it's definitely been cheaper for me in the long run to pay by token, and the flexibility it offers is great.
From my personal experience it's around 50:50 between Claude and Codex. Some people strongly prefer one over the other. I couldn't figure out yet why.
I just can't accept how slow codex is, and that you can't really use it interactively because of that. I prefer to just watch Claude code work and stop it once I don't like the direction it's taking.
bit the bullet this week and paid for a month of claude and a month of chatgpt plus. claude seems to have much lower token limits, both aggregate and rate-limited and GPT-5.2 isn't a bad model at all. $20 for claude is not enough even for a hobby project (after one day!), openai looks like it might be.
I feel like a lot of the criticism the GPT-5.x models receive only applies to specific use cases. I prefer these models over Anthropic's because they are less creative and less likely to take freedoms interpreting my prompts.
Sonnet 4.5 is great for vibe coding. You can give it a relatively vague prompt and it will take the initiative to interpret it in a reasonable way. This is good for non-programmers who just want to give the model a vague idea and end up with a working, sensible product.
But I usually do not want that, I do not want the model to take liberties and be creative. I want the model to do precisely what I tell it and nothing more. In my experience, te GPT-5.x models are a better fit for that way of working.
This story talks about MLX and Ollama but doesn't mention LM Studio - https://lmstudio.ai/
LM Studio can run both MLX and GGUF models but does so from an Ollama style (but more full-featured) macOS GUI. They also have a very actively maintained model catalog at https://lmstudio.ai/models
I suspect Ollama is at least partly moving away open source as they look to raise capitol, when they released their replacement desktop app they did so as closed source. You're absolutely right that people should be using llama.cpp - not only is it truly open source but it's significantly faster, has better model support, many more features, better maintained and the development community is far more active.
LMStudio? No, it's the easiest way to run am LLM locally that I've seen to the point where I've stopped looking at other alternatives.
It's cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux), detects the most appropriate GPU in your system and tells you whether the model you want to download will run within it's RAM footprint.
It lets you set up a local server that you can access through API calls as if you were remotely connected to an online service.
The tradeoff is a somewhat higher learning curve, since you need to manually browse the model library and choose the model/quantization that best fit your workflow and hardware. OTOH, it's also open-source unlike LMStudio which is proprietary.
Most LLM sites are now offering free plans, and they are usually better than what you can run locally, So I think people are running local models for privacy 99% of the time
I'm curious what the mental calculus was that a $5k laptop would competitively benchmark against SOTA models for the next 5 years was.
Somewhat comically, the author seems to have made it about 2 days. Out of 1,825. I think the real story is the folly of fixating your eyes on shiny new hardware and searching for justifications. I'm too ashamed to admit how many times I've done that dance...
Local models are purely for fun, hobby, and extreme privacy paranoia. If you really want privacy beyond a ToS guarantee, just lease a server (I know they can still be spying on that, but it's a threshold.)
I agree with everything you said, and yet I cannot help but respect a person who wants to do it himself. It reminds me of the hacker culture of the 80s and 90s.
> I'm curious what the mental calculus was that a $5k laptop would competitively benchmark against SOTA models for the next 5 years was.
Well, the hardware remains the same but local models get better and more efficient, so I don't think there is much difference between paying 5k for online models over 5 years vs getting a laptop (and well, you'll need a laptop anyway, so why not just get a good enough one to run local models in the first place?).
My 2023 Macbook Pro (M2 Max) is coming up to 3 years old and I can run models locally that are arguably "better" than what was considered SOTA about 1.5 years ago. This is of course not an exact comparison but it's close enough to give some perspective.
"This particular [80B] model is what I’m using with 128GB of RAM". The author then goes on to breezily suggest you try the 4B model instead of you only have 8GB of RAM. With no discussion of exactly what a hit in quality you'll be taking doing that.
In my experience the latest models (Opus 4.5, GPT 5.2) Are _just_ starting to keep up with the problems I'm throwing at them, and I really wish they did a better job, so I think we're still 1-2 years away from local models not wasting developer time outside of CRUD web apps.
Eh, these things are trained on existing data. The further you are from that the worse the models get.
I've noticed that I need to be a lot more specific in those cases, up to the point where being more specific is slowing me down, partially because I don't always know what the right thing is.
For sure, and I guess that's kind of my point -- if the OP says local coding models are now good enough, then it's probably because he's using things that are towards the middle of the distribution.
Cline + RooCode and VSCode already works really well with local models like qwen3-coder or even the latest gpt-oss. It is not as plug-and-play as Claude but it gets you to a point where you only have to do the last 5% of the work
I appreciate the author's modesty but the flip-flopping was a little confusing. If I'm not mistaken, the conclusion is that by "self-hosting" you save money in all cases, but you cripple performance in scenarios where you need to squeeze out the kind of quality that requires hardware that's impractical to cobble together at home or within a laptop.
I am still toying with the notion of assembling an LLM tower with a few old GPUs but I don't use LLMs enough at the moment to justify it.
If you want to do it cheap, get a desktop motherboard with two PCIe slots and two GPUs.
Cheap tier is dual 3060 12G. Runs 24B Q6 and 32B Q4 at 16 tok/sec. The limitation is VRAM for large context. 1000 lines of code is ~20k tokens. 32k tokens is is ~10G VRAM.
Expensive tier is dual 3090 or 4090 or 5090. You'd be able to run 32B Q8 with large context, or a 70B Q6.
For software, llama.cpp and llama-swap. GGUF models from HuggingFace. It just works.
If you need more than that, you're into enterprise hardware with 4+ PCIe slots which costs as much as a car and the power consumption of a small country. You're better to just pay for Claude Code.
I wouldn't run local models on the development PC. Instead run them on a box in another room or another location. Less fan noise and it won't influence the performance of the pc you're working on.
Latency is not an issue at all for LLMs, even a few hundred ms won't matter.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, except when working offline while traveling.
Some just like privacy and working without internet, I for example travel regularly on the train and like to have my laptop when there's not always good WiFi.
> 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.
Are people really doing that?
If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans from OpenAI and Anthropic. The OpenAI one in particular is a great deal, because Codex is charged a whole lot lower than Claude.
The time to cough up $100 or $200/month is when you've exhausted your $20/month quota and you are frustrated at getting cut off. At that point you should be able to make a responsible decision by yourself.
Me. Currently using Claude Max for personal coding projects. I've been on Claude's $20 plan and would run out of tokens. I don't want to give my money to OpenAI. So far these projects have not returned their value back to me, but I am viewing it as an investment in learning best pratices with these coding tools.
On a $20/mo plan doing any sort of agentic coding you'll hit the 5hr window limits in less than 20 minutes.
With Codex it only happened to me once in my 4.5hr session here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/
Claude Code is a whole lot less generous though.
It really depends. When building a lot of new features it happens quite fast. With some attention to context length I was often able to go for over an hour on the 20$ claude plan.
If you're doing mostly smaller changes, you can go all day with the 20$ Claude plan without hitting the limits. Especially if you need to thoroughly review the AI changes for correctness, instead of relying on automated tests.
I’ve been using vs code copilot pro for a few months and never really had any issue, once you hit the limit for one model, you generally still have a bunch more models to choose from. Unless I was vibe coding massive amounts of code without looking to testing, it’s hard to imagine I will run out of all the available pro models.
> If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans from OpenAI and Anthropic.
> The time to cough up $100 or $200/month is when you've exhausted your $20/month quota and you are frustrated at getting cut off. At that point you should be able to make a responsible decision by yourself.
These are the same people, by and large. What I have seen is users who purely vibe code everything and run into the limits of the $20/m models and pay up for the more expensive ones. Essentially they're trading learning coding (and time, in some cases, it's not always faster to vibe code than do it yourself) for money.
If this is the new way code is written then they are arguably learning how to code. Jury is still out though, but I think you are being a bit dismissive.
And as a hobbyist the time to sign up for the $20/month plan is after you've spent $20 on tokens at least a couple times.
YMMV based on the kinds of side projects you do, but it's definitely been cheaper for me in the long run to pay by token, and the flexibility it offers is great.
I spent $240 in one week through the API and realized the $20/month was a no-brainer.
I'm convinced the $20 gpt plus plan is the best plan right now. You can use Codex with gpt5.2. I've been very impressed with this.
(I also have the same MBP the author has and have used Aider with Qwen locally.)
From my personal experience it's around 50:50 between Claude and Codex. Some people strongly prefer one over the other. I couldn't figure out yet why.
I just can't accept how slow codex is, and that you can't really use it interactively because of that. I prefer to just watch Claude code work and stop it once I don't like the direction it's taking.
bit the bullet this week and paid for a month of claude and a month of chatgpt plus. claude seems to have much lower token limits, both aggregate and rate-limited and GPT-5.2 isn't a bad model at all. $20 for claude is not enough even for a hobby project (after one day!), openai looks like it might be.
I feel like a lot of the criticism the GPT-5.x models receive only applies to specific use cases. I prefer these models over Anthropic's because they are less creative and less likely to take freedoms interpreting my prompts.
Sonnet 4.5 is great for vibe coding. You can give it a relatively vague prompt and it will take the initiative to interpret it in a reasonable way. This is good for non-programmers who just want to give the model a vague idea and end up with a working, sensible product.
But I usually do not want that, I do not want the model to take liberties and be creative. I want the model to do precisely what I tell it and nothing more. In my experience, te GPT-5.x models are a better fit for that way of working.
Not everybody is broke.
This story talks about MLX and Ollama but doesn't mention LM Studio - https://lmstudio.ai/
LM Studio can run both MLX and GGUF models but does so from an Ollama style (but more full-featured) macOS GUI. They also have a very actively maintained model catalog at https://lmstudio.ai/models
LMStudio is so much better than Ollama it's silly it's not more popular.
LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is
but people should use llama.cpp instead
I suspect Ollama is at least partly moving away open source as they look to raise capitol, when they released their replacement desktop app they did so as closed source. You're absolutely right that people should be using llama.cpp - not only is it truly open source but it's significantly faster, has better model support, many more features, better maintained and the development community is far more active.
> LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is
and why should that affect usage? it's not like ollama users fork the repo before installing it.
It was worth mentioning.
Makes me think it's a sponsored post.
LMStudio? No, it's the easiest way to run am LLM locally that I've seen to the point where I've stopped looking at other alternatives.
It's cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux), detects the most appropriate GPU in your system and tells you whether the model you want to download will run within it's RAM footprint.
It lets you set up a local server that you can access through API calls as if you were remotely connected to an online service.
FWIW, Ollama already does most of this:
- Cross-platform
- Sets up a local API server
The tradeoff is a somewhat higher learning curve, since you need to manually browse the model library and choose the model/quantization that best fit your workflow and hardware. OTOH, it's also open-source unlike LMStudio which is proprietary.
I assumed from the name that it only ran llama-derived models, rather than whatever is available at huggingface. Is that not the case?
No, they have quite a broad list of models: https://ollama.com/search
[edit] Oh and apparently you can also directly run some models directly from HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/ollama
I think you should mention that LM Studio isn't open source.
I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself?
> I mean, what's the point of using local models if you can't trust the app itself?
and you think ollama doesn't do telemetry/etc. just because it's open source?
That's why i suggested using llama.cpp in my other comment.
Depends what people use them for, not every user of local models is doing so for privacy, some just don't like paying for online models.
Most LLM sites are now offering free plans, and they are usually better than what you can run locally, So I think people are running local models for privacy 99% of the time
I'm curious what the mental calculus was that a $5k laptop would competitively benchmark against SOTA models for the next 5 years was.
Somewhat comically, the author seems to have made it about 2 days. Out of 1,825. I think the real story is the folly of fixating your eyes on shiny new hardware and searching for justifications. I'm too ashamed to admit how many times I've done that dance...
Local models are purely for fun, hobby, and extreme privacy paranoia. If you really want privacy beyond a ToS guarantee, just lease a server (I know they can still be spying on that, but it's a threshold.)
I agree with everything you said, and yet I cannot help but respect a person who wants to do it himself. It reminds me of the hacker culture of the 80s and 90s.
> I'm curious what the mental calculus was that a $5k laptop would competitively benchmark against SOTA models for the next 5 years was.
Well, the hardware remains the same but local models get better and more efficient, so I don't think there is much difference between paying 5k for online models over 5 years vs getting a laptop (and well, you'll need a laptop anyway, so why not just get a good enough one to run local models in the first place?).
My 2023 Macbook Pro (M2 Max) is coming up to 3 years old and I can run models locally that are arguably "better" than what was considered SOTA about 1.5 years ago. This is of course not an exact comparison but it's close enough to give some perspective.
"This particular [80B] model is what I’m using with 128GB of RAM". The author then goes on to breezily suggest you try the 4B model instead of you only have 8GB of RAM. With no discussion of exactly what a hit in quality you'll be taking doing that.
In my experience the latest models (Opus 4.5, GPT 5.2) Are _just_ starting to keep up with the problems I'm throwing at them, and I really wish they did a better job, so I think we're still 1-2 years away from local models not wasting developer time outside of CRUD web apps.
Eh, these things are trained on existing data. The further you are from that the worse the models get.
I've noticed that I need to be a lot more specific in those cases, up to the point where being more specific is slowing me down, partially because I don't always know what the right thing is.
For sure, and I guess that's kind of my point -- if the OP says local coding models are now good enough, then it's probably because he's using things that are towards the middle of the distribution.
Cline + RooCode and VSCode already works really well with local models like qwen3-coder or even the latest gpt-oss. It is not as plug-and-play as Claude but it gets you to a point where you only have to do the last 5% of the work
I appreciate the author's modesty but the flip-flopping was a little confusing. If I'm not mistaken, the conclusion is that by "self-hosting" you save money in all cases, but you cripple performance in scenarios where you need to squeeze out the kind of quality that requires hardware that's impractical to cobble together at home or within a laptop.
I am still toying with the notion of assembling an LLM tower with a few old GPUs but I don't use LLMs enough at the moment to justify it.
If you ever do it, please make a guide! I've been toying with the same notion myself
If you want to do it cheap, get a desktop motherboard with two PCIe slots and two GPUs.
Cheap tier is dual 3060 12G. Runs 24B Q6 and 32B Q4 at 16 tok/sec. The limitation is VRAM for large context. 1000 lines of code is ~20k tokens. 32k tokens is is ~10G VRAM.
Expensive tier is dual 3090 or 4090 or 5090. You'd be able to run 32B Q8 with large context, or a 70B Q6.
For software, llama.cpp and llama-swap. GGUF models from HuggingFace. It just works.
If you need more than that, you're into enterprise hardware with 4+ PCIe slots which costs as much as a car and the power consumption of a small country. You're better to just pay for Claude Code.
Jeff Geerling has (not quite but sort of) guides: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338016
I wouldn't run local models on the development PC. Instead run them on a box in another room or another location. Less fan noise and it won't influence the performance of the pc you're working on.
Latency is not an issue at all for LLMs, even a few hundred ms won't matter.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, except when working offline while traveling.
Isnt the math of buying Nvidia stock with what you pay for all the hardware and then just paying $20 a month for codex with the annual returns better?
What are you doing with these models that you’re going above free tier on copilot?
Some just like privacy and working without internet, I for example travel regularly on the train and like to have my laptop when there's not always good WiFi.
your premise would've been right, if memory wouldn't skyrocketed like 400% in like 2 weeks.