I'm using Qwen 3.6 27B on a macbook with Pi. It's alright, it runs fairly quick (40 tps for quality version, 80 for the fast). It doesn't tend to one shot things but I'm generally comfortable fixing the bugs myself afterwards or prodding it a little bit. I find the harness matters a lot. "Continue" (the vscode extension) worked horribly, OpenCode was ok but its vibecoded internals make me view it as a security nightmare so I'm hesitant to run it, so I've settled on Pi for now.

Claude and ChatGPT are good deals right now, with the subsidies. They produce things faster and better. I guess not cheaper, in that inferrence on my macbook is basically free, although the macbook itself definitely wasn't. My focus on running local is around three principles:

1. I don't want to support surveilance capitalism by giving these companies my data anymore, when I can avoid it. And LLM companies want to vacuum up every detail of your life.

2. I don't find these companies to be remotely trustworthy, and I find them hostile to a healthy society, so I want to avoid giving them money going forward

3. I think they're going to start charging a lot more