I've been meaning to try programming with AI, but it's a bit tricky to manage the maze of models which one can download and run. I know one can pull down qwen3 or starcoder2 with ollama, but there's multiple variations and I have no idea what everything means and what the implications are for running them on my PC. I suppose cloud-based offers simplify all that, but I don't trust them for a hair.

Unfortunately, local modals are not good yet. For serious work, you'll need Claude/Gemimi/OpenAI models. Pretty huge difference.

Just try out AntiGravity ( Google) or Claude ( 17$)/month.

Ollama with qwen3 and starcoder2 are ok.

I'd recomment to experiment with the following models atm. (eg. with "open-webui"): - gpt-oss:20b ( fast) - nemotron-3-nano:30b ( good general purpose)

It doesn't compare to the large LLM's atm. though.