Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop

I sometimes still code with a local LLM but can't imagine doing it on a laptop. I have a server that has GPUs and runs llama.cpp behind llama-swap (letting me switch between models quickly). The best local coding setup I've been able to do so far is using Aider with gpt-oss-120b.

I guess you could get a Ryzen AI Max+ with 128GB RAM to try and do that locally but non-nVidia hardware is incredibly slow for coding usage since the prompts become very large and take exponentially longer but gpt-oss is a sparse model so maybe it won't be that bad.

Also just to point it out, if you use OpenRouter with things like Aider or roocode or whatever you can also flag your account to only use providers with a zero-data retention policy if you are truly concerned about anyone training on your source code. GPT5 and Claude are infinitely better, faster and cheaper than anything I can do locally and I have a monster setup.

gpt-oss-120b is amazing. I created a RAG agent to hold most of GCP documentation (separate download, parsing, chunking, etc). ChatGPT finished a 50 question quiz in 6 min with a score of 46 / 50. gpt-oss-120b took over an hour but got 47 / 50. All the other local LLMs I tried were small and performed way worse, like less than 50% correct.

I ran this on an i7 with 64gb of RAM and an old nvidia card with 8g of vram.

EDIT: Forgot to say what the RAG system was doing which was answering a 50 question multiple choice test about GCP and cloud engineering.

you can run the 120b model on an 8GB GPU? or are you running this on CPU with the 64GB RAM?

I'm about to try this out lol

The 20b model is not great, so I'm hoping 120b is the golden ticket.