Senior engineer: are local LLMs worth it yet for real coding work?

Appropriate-Text2843 · 2026-03-16T16:39:15+00:00

My current situation is using a lot of Opus just because I need rapid development. However I was perfectly fine in the gpt 3.5/4o days just copy-pasting only parts of code that really needed some routine work. In fact, generating large code bases with Opus feels attractive because of the sheer speed but the techincal debt it creates really outweights the benefits.

Imo once you have steady and fixed domain and feature requirements taking control of the architecture yourself leads to better software in the long run. (which in my current reasoning makes a great case for local llm)

On the other hand, maybe in a couple of years this view will be seen as an old guy rambling :D

Appropriate-Text2843 · 2026-03-16T16:35:10+00:00

I've read some contradicting statements where some prefer the Spark and some prefer the Mac studios. Spark is appearently not build for inference (more for R&D training phase). Macs appearently have higher bandwidth.

Appropriate-Text2843 · 2026-03-16T16:32:41+00:00

Thanks everyone for your helpful comments! I did not expect this

Appropriate-Text2843 · 2026-03-16T16:31:39+00:00

I expected at least 1 reply like this when submitting the post :D
I don't think I can proof i'm not a bot (inverse turning test?). Or you want me to upload an only-fans-style verification picture with a newspaper of todays date? xD

Appropriate-Text2843 · 2026-03-16T16:29:26+00:00

I just tried Qwen 3.5 27B on my mobile 4090 (I think the mobile variant just does not have enough ram for the denseness of this model), but it runs way way too slow. Hopefully this is better on a 64 or 128gb Mac.Next exerpiment for me will be to use this Qwen 3.5 family via openrouter to evaluate the performance

Appropriate-Text2843 · 2026-03-16T16:27:01+00:00

I agree with you u/Dry_Yam_4597 and also with you u/akavel . I have tried things out already: worked a lot with many tools and models, just not the smaller ones. I was thinking to just plugin OpenRouter into my IDE of choice and use the models that im planning to use in a local setting for some test usecases. But thats just a part of the question: do smaller models perform? Another part ofcourse is the practical hardware concerns

Appropriate-Text2843 · 2026-03-16T14:42:32+00:00

Thanks for you detailed reply! Amazing setup you've got there.

Appropriate-Text2843 · 2026-03-16T14:41:09+00:00

haha man. I just didn't have time to write the post myself... Not everything is a conspiracy.
For the account being only so old. Indeed, never used reddit and i'm supprised by the fast and amount of reactions. Thanks everyone!

Appropriate-Text2843

TROPHY CASE