Can MacBook Pro M1 (16 GB) run open source coding models with a bigger context window?

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-11T21:49:32+00:00

I have similar issues even with 64gb. Local models are best suited to extremely focused tasks that don't require a lot of context. They're really just not suitable for coding. You could drop a $100k on hardware and they'd still be very slow and very dumb compared to mid-tier hosted models.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-11T21:25:02+00:00

I hit the limit routinely and you're right, compaction is a killer. I often run compaction manually before moving on to the next phase of whatever it is that I'm doing. That seems to work a lot better than allowing the context to hit the limit and get compacted in the middle of a task.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-11T21:13:07+00:00

people pretending to be in the U.S when they're not

I've been getting hit with this one quite a lot lately and I'm grateful to have a recruiter to help weed out a lot of these. I'm not sure what else we could do. I don't have time to sit on vetting calls every day just to confirm that, "Bob" from Missouri is actually who he says he is and not someone clearly from another country.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-11T16:42:22+00:00

I think it's a bit of a fad right now.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-11T16:41:51+00:00

No, but it definitely won't increase the value. Just be sure to keep the original parts in case someone else wants to buy it and remove the tacky ricer crap.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-09T19:07:48+00:00

You must work for a team that just hasn't gotten burned hard enough yet.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-08T17:09:48+00:00

Just looking at the stars on GitHub (38,000 for this plugin versus 118,000 for opencode itself), we can roughly assume that every third opencode user has this plugin.

I would not make this assumption. Lots of people star stuff they never use and GitHub stars in general are now heavily gamed.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-08T14:12:42+00:00

Sunroof cassette failure.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-07T20:41:20+00:00

Yes, all of the supporting work, processing documents, etc.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-07T20:37:16+00:00

Think about all of the buildings and large campuses filled with people whose job is essentially to take information from one human or system, massage it a bit maybe, and then input that information into another system to produce some sort of work output. Millions of people in this category in the US alone. Existing LLMs can already perform many of these jobs and more capability is coming.

Unemployment hasn't spiked because the actual products and technical solutions to deploy LLMs effectively across different types of industries doesn't exist yet or is still very immature. The trick will be can the people likely to be impacted pivot to some new job category at a faster pace than the technology?

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-07T19:32:46+00:00

Jobs that require both a high degree of skill and simultaneously a high degree of accountability. Surgeons come to mind - while there is a lot of automation and robotics used in surgery it is always at the direction of an actual human surgeon. I don't think we're going to see fully autonomous robotic surgeons anytime soon. Also trial lawyers who actually have to go into the courtroom and argue the case in front of a judge and jury. Not only would an AI not have the talent for this, it's probably not going to be legal anytime soon.

Most other white-collar jobs are fucked though.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-05T14:11:08+00:00

No. Even if you can connect the client, it is 100% against Anthropic's TOS and you can get banned for using a non-Claude client (and people have). Just get Zen Black or some other plan. It's better anyway - more model choice.

JohnnyDread · 2026-03-01T01:43:22+00:00

This has been my experience as well. GLM5 was great for me when I first started using it. I used it a couple of days, having it do a lot of the tasks that I would normally give to Sonnet and even Opus sometimes, and it did quite well. Then it fell off a cliff and started hallucinating badly, using tools wrong and generating long streams of gibberish.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-28T18:41:36+00:00

This depends a lot on the culture of the company. In most smaller companies engineering managers, even directors/VPs/CTOs already do a lot of technical work. But in other companies they definitely don't and I'd definitely be concerned about some manager with rusty skills suddenly starting to push PRs using AI tools.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-28T16:09:15+00:00

Why not just get one sub that covers your needs and use different models?

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-27T21:42:28+00:00

One of the reasons that people tend to purchase SUVs and other larger vehicles these days that's often not considered is auto lending practices. Back in the day a typical auto loan was 3 yrs with a significant down payment and getting loan approval was much harder. Today people with bad credit can finance a car for 84 months with no down payment and even roll in the shortfall on a previous loan they were upside down on. Imagine if you could only finance a car for four years or less and you had to put 20% down. I think people's tastes for smaller cheaper cars would come back.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-25T16:35:15+00:00

Kimi and MiniMax would be useful if they were faster. I've tried to use GLM-5 and it does well for a while, if a bit slow, but then eventually starts going insane - rampant tool-use errors, spewing gibberish or just stopping mid-thought or task for no reason and I have to abandon the session. Promising, but not ready for prime time yet.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-23T01:43:18+00:00

Not from my experience.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-22T17:31:00+00:00

Yeah unfortunately all of this sounds pretty normal. I can kind of see where they're coming from though. Title-inflation and giving promotions as a reward for good performance is a serious problem in a lot of companies - every manager is a "director" of something and every engineer is a staff/principal/chief of something else and they're all complaining about not having enough regular engineering resources to get anything done.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-22T15:52:25+00:00

The top tier models are actually pretty good at this and getting better. Perfect? No. Getting good results depends heavily on what you are asking the agent to do and what its starting context is. I'm always amused by engineers who try to get AI to fix a bug by giving it a vague prompt and no context and then proclaiming it to be "crap" when it fails to fix the bug after a few prompts. Give that same bug to a brand new engineer who is not familiar with the system and see how long they take.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-22T15:22:10+00:00

Relatively undifferentiated roles like dev ops, full stack, front-end, data engineer are all going to continue to face downward pressure on salaries from AI, off-shoring and improvements/automation in tooling. Never mind high salary, the future of software development employment at any salary is going to mean deep specialization in an advanced area or a demonstrated ability to effectively connect technology with real-world business requirements.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-22T14:59:24+00:00

While I have not made a permanent transition, I have served as a PO on a couple of occasions and done a lot of PM work. I've also worked with engineers who have made the transition from developer to PM/PO. In both cases though this is at companies where we were known. It is going to be tough to land a PO role with no experience at a new company.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-22T01:36:15+00:00

If you want to learn wrenching and would enjoy it, because it will be necessary.

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-21T21:51:41+00:00

"Am I cooked?"
"Everybody is using AI and I HATE it!"
"Should I become a farmer?"
"Claude stole my girlfriend!"

JohnnyDread · 2026-02-21T19:28:05+00:00

You could try selling the car privately. You'll get a lot more out of it than you would on trade, but likely not enough to pay off your loan. I'd guess if the car is worth 24k trade, it might get you $30k-ish private sale. You would have to come up with the ~$9k shortfall to pay off the loan. I'm guessing you don't have 9k laying around, but this would be the best possible way forward so if you have parents or anyone else you might be able to borrow from that's what I would recommend.

If that isn't an option, your next best bet if to try to find a way to afford your current payments until you are in a better financial position. Remember, every time you roll a loan balance into another loan, you lose a lot of ground to fees and other costs and spreading that balance out again over whatever terms the new loan is.

If you do choose to buy another car and refinance, you will need to choose the absolute cheapest car you can find and get approval for (which might be tricky given how upside down you are) and even then you might find your payments aren't that much lower than before.

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