We’ve reached a point where on device AI coding that is free, offline, and capable isn’t just a theoretical possibility; it’s sitting on my lap, barely warming my thighs. My local MacBook Air setup includes a Qwen3 Coder Flash with a 1M context, Cline in a VSCode IDE. No internet, no cloud, no ID verification- this is the forbidden tech. Current stats: All agentic tools work great local, sandboxed, and MCP OK model output precision 17 tokens/sec. Not great, not terrible 65K tokens context, the model can do 1M, but let’s be real, my MacBook Air would probably achieve fusion before hitting that smoothly Standard backend and cache off for the test All inference and function calling happen locally, offline, untethered. The cloud didn’t even get a memo.
I run Qwen3-Coder 480B locally on my Z8, with a 1-million token context window. It’s the equivalent of parallel-parking a Nimitz-class carrier in a kiddie pool. Thanks to whatever dark pact the llama.cpp, CUDA, and kernel folks signed, hybrid inferencing + VRAM↔RAM offload let me stream the model’s synapses across Xeon, RAM, and four lonely A6000s without summoning either the OOM killer or a small house fire.