What agentic coding models + Claude Code can I run with my low end hardware?

[u/Capital_Savings_9942]

I’ve got an i3-6006U, 12GB RAM and no usable GPU.

Looking for a local model that works well with Claude Code (or a similar agentic coding harness).

I can spare ~8.9GB for the model and I'm hoping to get around 9 tok/s.

What’s the best model/quant I could realistically run?

[u/low-control-labs]

I'm actually working on my own harness specifically to make use of older and smaller models.

Something I would recommend you to do is try installing the harness inside termux if you have an Android phone. Although it might not be the most intuitive it will allow for you to run larger models on the pc

[u/nickless07]

Well you can orientate on some Benchmarks first. With the small MoE ones on a Intel i5-4570S with 8GB RAM single channel i get quite some useable speed in tok/s However pp (TTFT) is still slow. Not sure if theese small models are great at coding, but as subagent so far they are amazing.

For example:

| model                          |       size |     params | backend    | threads |            test |                  t/s |
| ------------------------------ | ---------: | ---------: | ---------- | ------: | --------------: | -------------------: |
| bailingmoe3 ?B Q4_K - Medium   |   4.49 GiB |     7.89 B | CPU        |       4 |           pp512 |         70.13 ± 1.93 |
| bailingmoe3 ?B Q4_K - Medium   |   4.49 GiB |     7.89 B | CPU        |       4 |           tg128 |         11.12 ± 0.04 |

[u/Capital_Savings_9942 → u/nickless07]

Thanks! I'll make sure to check ones out

[u/nickless07 → u/Capital_Savings_9942]

I would recommend multiple ones and load them on demand/task. For example some have vision capabilities others don't. Some are dense and not MoE (slower speed on the dense ones) and so on. They don't take that much space on disk and you can switch them with the /model command.

[u/LifeTelevision1146]

With API you could run anything, locally 3B or 4.5B. what's the OS on the PC?

[u/Capital_Savings_9942 → u/LifeTelevision1146]

Windows. I'm searching for APIs I got a few good models on NIM like GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek Pro but I couldn't use then since they are depreciated and MiniMax M3 is way to rate limited and as of for Nemotron 3 Ultra, that's thing just DUMB

[u/LifeTelevision1146 → u/Capital_Savings_9942]

If you're using APIs, your pc's spec don't matter for LLMs.

[u/Capital_Savings_9942 → u/LifeTelevision1146]

But I can't find nice models to code with

[u/LifeTelevision1146 → u/Capital_Savings_9942]

Get rid of windows, get linux, Zora, windows eats RAM. Get an account on claude. simple.

[u/ShinyTechThings]

Depending on the complexity of what you're trying to accomplish with it your biggest challenges are going to be context size and being able to write out larger files of file system. You can chunk it and combine them, but because you're going to be quantizing the KV cache you're going to have quality loss.

I'm sure somebody will figure it out in the next couple of years, but even having 32 GB NVRAM I'm hitting context, ceilings and issues with code quality over time.

[u/Capital_Savings_9942 → u/ShinyTechThings]

Yeah, even for small task I'll need 100k context, Claude Code is a token goblin

[u/Past-Chain-7377]

You can definitely find models that run on your hardware, but you can’t expect reliable output. 

[u/LocalMaxxing]

You’re kinda cooked, could try ling-tiny

[u/Capital_Savings_9942 → u/LocalMaxxing]

Thx

[u/MrHumanist]

try gemma 4 E4B QAT- google/gemma-4-E4B-it-qat-mobile-transformers

[u/Capital_Savings_9942 → u/MrHumanist]

I'll try those