Coding with local LLMs

[Dean_0]

I have a GitHub Copilot subscription and I use Claude and Codex for most coding tasks. It’s hard to drag myself away from that tooling when the quality of the output is so high.

I have also recently started using OpenSpec, which is brilliant in combination with those tools.

I want to find a use case for the local models, maybe for simpler, targeted refactoring tasks?

It may be possible to use something like Sonnet/Opus with OpenSpec to create the proposal, spec, design and task list and then switch to a local model to execute the tasks (use the best models to plan, the cheap models to implement).

I am finding myself using local models integrated into applications to power end use features more than for development, confident this can change as the models evolve.

I created a somewhat related thread, and this reply is potentially useful for the coding use case:

Which language models are you using?

I have an opencode setup where I have GLM-4.7-Flash as more of an architecting agent and qwen3-coder-next as the implementing agent. But glm just does not perform well at all it is super slow compared to qwen which is way bigger and way more performant. Anyone have any suggestions for a good reasoning model to use instead? looking for something 20-30 Gb. Anyone have experience with a better model

And another thread which may offer some insight:

Super simple llama.cpp Vulkan GLM-4.7 Flash setup

Got an extremely useable setup of GLM-4.7 Flash together in a docker setup here: GitHub - ndom91/GLM-4.7-Flash-Strix-Halo: Strix Halo setup for GLM-4.7 Flash using llama.cpp It’s using the vulkan backend for llama.cpp and will expose an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint so you can easily link it into opencode or openweb-ui. The opencode experience really does feel very snappy, im extremely pleasantly surprised. Will give this a go in place of Claude Code this coming week at work!