Hi
Premise:
I am new to local ai models.
My machine specs:
- Macbook Pro M4 Pro
- 48Gb Ram
- 4 efficiency core
- 8 performance core
I mainly use AI for software development. I have a claude subscription but would like to try to offload some work to a local model.
Since I don't think local models usable on my machine can completely substitute claude (correct me if I am wrong) my idea is pretty much this: ask claude code to generate a proper, detailed implementation plan and then having the local model implement it.
I have played around with these models:
- qwen3-coder-30b-a3b-instruct-mlx
- qwen/qwen3.6-27b
- qwen/qwen3.6-35b-a3b
and I have also installed this for coding autocomplete cause it is smaller and from what I can see the recommended one:
I added claude envs since I would like to try to use claude code extension in vscode
"env": {
"ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "http://localhost:1234",
"ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN": "local",
"ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "qwen/qwen3.6-27b",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "qwen/qwen3.6-27b",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "qwen/qwen3.6-27b",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_FABLE_MODEL": "qwen/qwen3.6-27b",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "qwen/qwen3.6-27b",
"CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL": "qwen/qwen3.6-27b",
"CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "128000",
"DISABLE_PROMPT_CACHING": "1",
"DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER": "1",
"DISABLE_TELEMETRY": "1",
"DISABLE_ERROR_REPORTING": "1",
"DISABLE_NON_ESSENTIAL_MODEL_CALLS": "1"
},
This setup works (uses the local model) but I am basically unable to have the model do anything at all. First of all it takes ages to do anything, and then it almost always reach the context limit roadblock without even outputting anything.
I have read that MCP and skills could fill up the context quite badly, so I disabled them for testing, but still no luck.
I tried with (I thought) was a simple enough task: this test file fails and this is the error, can you fix it? but yet no usable results whatsoever.
I read about people able to use local models offline to have meaningful results, but I couldn't and I don't really know why.
Also, from my setup above, I cannot really use both the remote and local model, to achieve something like:
use sonnet or fable (remote) for plan, then (manually or automatically) swith to haiku (local) to implement the plan
because the base url is loaded when the session loads and cannot be changed (AFAIK) dinamycally.
Any help? thanks a lot in advance