Not necessarily!

If you have a semi-recent MacBook with even 32GB, you can run 20GB models that are pretty damn smart, with room to spare for the rest of your toolchain.

If you’re reasonably connected to the code you’re writing and prompting the AI at the level of the code, not the level of the feature, you can get some fantastic results.

Sure, it’s not the completely automated dreamland that’s been sold, but it’s still a speed-up on par from going from assembler to a higher-level language, which is still immense.

And for effectively free, if you have a machine that would otherwise have been considered “developer-grade” for a lot of tasks anyway.

What models have you found to work for which tasks? I find the local models very useful but not in a way that's replaced cloud models (yet, I remain hopeful).