I use local models on a Mac mini for most things and fall back to the hosted ones when they can't get the job done. Of course you have to break the work into smaller pieces yourself that a local model can understand. One good side effect of this is that you end up actually learning the code and how it's structured.

Dunno man. Yesterday I played with Qwen3.6-27B ( 128gb to play with though so 100k context set ) and I think right now the main benefit of hosted models is context, frontier models and.. my stuff is already there.

what size models are you using? this sounds like a good idea