Which model(s) are you running (e.g., Ollama, LM Studio, or others) and which open-source coding assistant/integration (for example, a VS Code plugin) you’re using?
What laptop hardware do you have (CPU, GPU/NPU, memory, whether discrete GPU or integrated, OS) and how it performs for your workflow?
What kinds of tasks you use it for (code completion, refactoring, debugging, code review) and how reliable it is (what works well / where it falls short).
I'm conducting my own investigation, which I will be happy to share as well when over.
Thanks! Andrea.
I love local models for some use cases. However for coding there is a big gap between the quality of models you can run at home and those you can't (at least on hardware I can afford) like GLM 4.6, Sonnet 4.5, Codex 5, Qwen Coder 408.
What makes local coding models compelling?
>> motivation
It's the only way to be sure it's not being trained on.
Most people never come up with any truly novel ideas to code. That's fine. There's no point in those people not submitting their projects to LLM providers.
This lack of creativity is so prevalent, that many people believe that it is not possible to come up with new ideas (variants: it's all been tried before; or: it would inevitably be tried by someone else anyway; or: people will copy anyway).
Some people do come up with new stuff, though. And (sometimes) they don't want to be trained on. That is the main edge IMO, for running local models.
In a word: competition.
Note, this is distinct from fearing copying by humans (or agents) with LLMs at their disposal. This is about not seeding patterns more directly into the code being trained on.
Most people would say, forget that, just move fast and gain dominance. And they might not be wrong. Time may tell. But the reason can still stand as a compelling motivation, at least theoretically.
Tangential: IANAL, but I imagine there's some kind of parallel concept around code/concept "property ownership". If you literally send your code to a 3P LLM, I'm guessing they have rights to it and some otherwise handwavy (quasi important) IP ownership might become suspect. We are possibly in a post-IP world (for some decades now depending on who's talking), but not everybody agrees on that currently, AFAICT.