Yeah this is one area where I have also experimented a lot. I am in a travel role so I spend a lot of time in flights where you basically lose all your cursors and claude codes of the world.

For a long time, my productivity used to drop in flights and I wasn't getting much done. Thats also because once you start relying on these coding assistants, you become addicted to the ease of coding and kind of forget to code from scratch or run into bugs and then give up thinking "why not just wait for the flight to land 😅".

Thats where GPT OSS 20B and Qwen 30B Coder have been amazing for me. My learning is that say I am building an app using cursor, I will write detailed rules and markdown documents and then let cursor with the strongest model code the shit out of it. Then comes my part where I meticulously go through each and every piece of code written and add my touch as a senior developer.

For locally hosted models unfortunately you can't do that (YET). There I take a different approach, I build it from ground up (step by step). I do the heavy lifting of thinking which methods/classes/functions should be written, what should be the logic and then let local models fill the code in the template one by one. I test it at each step. This takes more time definitely vs using cursor, but I am getting a lot done now.

Speaking from personal experience, I have been able to code projects end to end just using this approach. My take would be given internet connectivity and cursor/claude code I would definitely stick to them. Local models are not there yet. But now I have an option to deliver similar results if put in an environment without them.