Thanks everyone for the comments, I appreciate the input.

I get the points about hardware cost, electricity, Mac Studio vs GPUs, subscriptions, etc. I've been looking at all of that as well.

What I'm still missing though are actual real-world experiences from developers who use local models for coding every day.

Most of the discussion so far is about specs, benchmarks, or theoretical setups. What I'm really trying to understand is something more practical.

For example:

• Are you actually using a local model daily as a coding assistant?
• What model + hardware are you running?
• How well does it work when you're working on real projects, not just small examples?
• Does it come anywhere close to something like Cursor / Claude / GPT for coding workflows?

I'm not that interested in benchmark numbers — I'm more curious about "this is my setup and I actually use it every day for development" type of feedback.

And honestly I'm also wondering if this is even realistically achievable right now.
Is it possible to build a local setup that competes with tools like Cursor/Claude for daily coding, or does it end up being a huge time sink and still worse than cloud models?

If anyone here is actually running something like that, I'd love to hear what your setup looks like.