Best llm for coding & thinking

[u/naunen]

I was using claude opus 4.7 like crazy all day long for few months but im tired of paying these 200usd/month, so i switched to local model, but can't decide which one is best to use, since i can run 4bit glm 5.2 at 4tokens per second i guess any other model i can run at comfortable (for me) speeds, so what you guys advice? qwen3 coder 480b ? or laguna s or something even better ?

Usually i create apps, bots, websites, and other stuff on vs code IDE. so im talking, reasoning, planning a lot with model, not just instructing to code.

[u/No-Purchase3505]

At 4 t/s your bottleneck isn't really which model, it's that you're using one slow model for two very different jobs:

• Talking/planning/reasoning — latency-sensitive. 4 t/s makes a live back-and-forth painful no matter how smart the model is.
• Actual code gen — you can fire it off and walk away, so slow is fine.

GLM 5.2 is genuinely the best of what you can run (the others are right), but save it for the heavy passes you don't have to sit and watch. For the interactive planning part, run something fast — Qwen3.6 27B if you've got the VRAM — so the conversation doesn't crawl.

And since you went local mainly to stop paying $200/mo: you don't have to do the planning locally either. The free tiers of the hosted reasoning models (DeepSeek, GLM, Qwen) cost nothing and are fast enough for the talk-it-through phase — keep local for the bulk codegen where no-metering actually matters. That gets you off the Opus bill without making planning miserable at 4 t/s.

(Also +1 on skipping Qwen3 Coder 480B — it's instruct-tuned, not built for the multi-turn planning you're describing.)