I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now.

I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used

Mistral 7B

Gemma 3

OpenAI OSS-20B

Qwen 3 MOE , as well as a number of other Qwen variants like Qwen 2.5 Coder

across a lot of different system setups like

raw llama.cpp with Open WebUI

llama-cpp-python

Ollama

llamafiles and

LM Studio

Where are local models now?

Early on, models were slow, hard to use, and just not that accurate for most programming tasks. The idea that local models were severely lagging behind was largely true until, for me, the release of GPT-OSS.…