Just sharing my $0.02 here - I have ethical objections to using OpenAI or Anthropic products so I was a reluctant adopter of LLMs at all. Local models address most, though not all, my moral objections so I’ve been using them for work and personal projects for about a month.

The hardware I have (32gb Macs and a gaming PC with 10gb 3080) can only get me to Qwen3.6-35B-A3B at various quants but that’s enough (200-400 PP, 20-30 TG).

It’s taken some time to learn how to best utilize it - some things take a bit of babysitting or direction - but it’s quite useful. Not having ever used CC I can’t compare but it’s been a great assistant or pair programmer for everything from embedded C++ to Vue. I wish I could run 27B as there have been moments when this model feels like it just can’t quite figure something out but those moments are quite rare. For a lot of tasks it’s a huge time saver and has proved super capable at digging into and fixing bugs given pretty vague instructions.

I’m using Pi as my harness.