Wildly understating this part.
Even the best local models (ones you run on beefy 128GB+ RAM machines) get nowhere close to the sheer intelligence of Claude/Gemini/Codex. At worst these models will move you backwards and just increase the amount of work Claude has to do when your limits reset.
PC or Mac? A PC, ya, no way, not without beefy GPUs with lots of VRAM. A mac? Depends on the CPU, an M3 Ultra with 128GB of unified RAM is going to get closer, at least. You can have decent experiences with a Max CPU + 64GB of unified RAM (well, that's my setup at least).
For VS Code code completion in Continue using a Qwen3-coder 7b model. For CLI work Qwen coder 32b for sidebar. 8 bit quant for both.
I need to take a look at Qwen3-coder-next, it is supposed to have made things much faster with a larger model.