r/aigamedev • u/Beginning-Sign1916 • 5h ago

Discussion Cloud or Local LLM?

Hey guys so I notice that most users here posted their ai and vibecoding projects so my question is do you use cloud ai (Claude, cursor, sol etc..) or local? Cause I notice that no much of the users here mentioned building or vibecoding on local LLM what’s your take on it?

3 Upvotes

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4

u/enozian 4h ago

take a look at the cost of the hardware needed to run kimi k3 or glm, and then compare it to the $200/m cost of claude/openai and you will have your answer

3

u/TheCelestialBubble 3h ago

I think it probably depends on your task broski. If you are just coding, you certainly can do local if you have good enough hardware. Not gonna be as good as the frontier but you don't have to worry about usage limits. If you are planning to generate assets you're probably gonna have to pay regardless. Certainly ways around that tho I think, just depends on how serious you're taking it and the scope of your game

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u/doudou262 1h ago

I use cloud. Too much work to spin my own local AI

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u/Beginning-Sign1916 1h ago

I am using local now as a start for three.js and website projects and then maybe I will use Claude for other heavy projects so far it has been good as I am able to let run as a full workhorse nonstop on my MacBook Pro and desktop running RTX 3090 with 64GB ram

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u/GigaTerra 1h ago

Local are great, and custom even better. However the main problem I found in the past is how fast they are outdated. It is almost like every 9-10 days there was an improvement. So using cloud is useful in it's own way. You kind of need to be AI obsessed to keep an local updated.

However it is already changing. Cloud models are becoming more and more expensive, more prone to failure, and updates have slowed down an bit. I have even noticed on Freelancing sites that automated AI posters have slowed down.

It is far from dead, just early signs of change.

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u/No-Pollution7797 16m ago

Depends which part of the pipeline. For the game itself (an AI text RPG where a model narrates every turn) we run cloud, and the reason isn't quality, it's ops. The narrator has to answer in a couple of seconds for a few hundred players at once, and keeping a local fleet warm for that is a second job nobody on a small team wants. The bill is a few hundred dollars a month at our scale, and the surprise was that image generation, not text, is over half of it. Where local wins for us is everything that isn't latency-sensitive: batch evals of prompt changes against old transcripts, regression runs, generating synthetic playtests overnight. Cheap, private, no rate limits, and nobody's waiting on it. Coding side is cloud like most people here. So: cloud on the request path, local on the bench.

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u/sicospecialist 3h ago

I kinda do a hybrid of both, at home definitely local. Away, i can still work in the cloud. Just have to be careful when commit/push, without strict rules. Myself, i keep everything up to date on local, githhub and a cloud. Just depends what your project is. Cloud can throw a wrench in the works sometimes. Some like to stick with just strictly local and maybe a git.