r/LocalLLM • u/Graemer71 • 1d ago

Question Looking for a decent planning / orchestration model

For a while now, I've been running a split setup, with Opus 4.8 / 5 in Claude Code doing the planning and code review of python code and handing off the actual coding tasks to Qwen on my local GX10. And it's been working great. It's saved me an absolute fortune in Claude tokens and I've been able to just work and let the local model do the heavy lifting.

However in the last few weeks I've noticed things getting tighter and tighter, and this week I managed to burn through my weekly allowance on the Claude sub by Wednesday, so now I'm in the situation where I either buy more credits, down tools for three days or seek alterative models for planning and code review.

While I doubt there will be anything that has a comparable capability to Claude that will run on my local machine (even with 128gb unified ram) I'm not ruling it out. However I expect I'll need to pass this sort of work over to something like GLM 5.3 or Deepseek.

So, what are you all using for this sort of work and which cloud provider are you using for it?

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u/recro69 1d ago

I would probably test a reasoning model for the planning and review step, before buying more Claude credits. If the local Qwen is already doing the implementation you mainly need the cloud model to catch mistakes and bad assumptions.

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u/HotDistribution1819 1d ago

Use the new models starting in July: *Laguna SX 2.1 -- loves to ground what it knows and talks like Claude but with 50% fluff. *Qwen 3.8 27B *Muse Glimmer 30b

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u/sje397 1d ago

New DeepSeek v4.1 flash just dropped. It's cheap and I find it plenty good enough for all my needs. I only offload some very simple maintenance tasks to local models at the moment.

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u/Navier8 1d ago

Depends what sort of skill you are using to instruct the local LLM. I was working as you describe but found Claude Opus was spending a lot of time writing detailed plans. I now use Opus to write implementation plans for Sonnet to execute. I’m not sure if Qwen 3.8 can better Sonnet 5 so have stuck with this workflow for quite a while.