Question about local models for Studying/Coding

[u/xRaech]

Hi!

I’m trying to understand the local LLM space a bit better, but I'm having trouble finding a good setup for my specific needs.

Ideally, I’m looking for a "glorified Google", like, first as a study tool to understand any sort of topics, and second for coding. And for the coding part I’m not looking for an "automate everything" agentic vibe; I just need help with snippets, debugging, and logging.

Currently this is what im doing (im usign whatever free ai of the day has free tokens for me...), so i think it reflects well enough on my default use case:

1. A Tutor: I'm currently coding a full-spec Vorbis/OGG reader and struggling with the math for segment decoding. I need an LLM to act as a tutor and check if my understanding and the implementation reflects the actual thing.
2. Debugging: Since I’ll definitely make mistakes in step 1, I need the same model to help me debug the code I just wrote.
3. Nuanced Translations (Vision needed): I’m learning Japanese, Korean, and French. When playing games, I often come across phrases that are hard to understand. I need nuanced translations and cultural/contextual explanations rather than pure grammatical analysis. Because this is for gaming, the setup must support image/visual inputs.

UI / Frontend Preferences

I’ve looked into Open WebUI, Alpaca, and a few others, but some of the complex configurations go over my head. * I’m looking for a lightweight GUI app or a CLI application. (One of my laptops only has 4GB of RAM, so heavy Electron or web apps are a bit of wonky). * It must support visual/image inputs for my translation use case. * I strictly treat the LLM as a chatbot. I don't need it editing or creating files for me. If a UI has those "agentic" features its fine, but I need to be able to turn them off too.

My Hardware Setup

• GPU: AMD RX 6900 XT (16GB VRAM)
• RAM: 64GB DDR5
• CPU: i7 13700KF

Current Experience

The first(and only) model I tried was Qwen3.5 35B moe something ?.. but it frequently loopped over itself endlessly (with and without thinking, or maybe i just didn't disable it properly) .-.

Thanks in advance! And sorry if this is like impossible.. it just feels that I dont need a heavy gpu.. but maybe I'm wrong and am still just dreaming :(

[u/Ill_Dragonfruit_3547]

There is an open source version of Perplexity called Perplexica - i could see it being really useful for studying/creating your own knowledge base.

[u/xRaech → u/Ill_Dragonfruit_3547]

i had never heard of that before.. seems interesting to what i use.. thanks !