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Posted by kkm 16 hours ago

How to setup a local coding agent on macOS(ikyle.me)
374 points | 92 comments
ljosifov 10 minutes ago|
For high Ram (unified), and relatively middling to lowish Tflops and bandwidth GB/s, usually MoEs are most hopeful. The current top-1 in the (iq, tok/s, @ context depth) ranks for me (M2 Max, 96gb) is DeepSeek-V4-Flash REAP25 <65gb gguf + ds4-server + pi agent. Not better than cloud API ofc, but useful enough to endure if I need to. E.g on a non-Internet 4h flight the battery (local llm draws 60w) held long enough. REAP supporting ds4 branch here

https://github.com/ljubomirj/ds4/tree/reap-compact-support

DS4F dropping to unusable <10 tok/s only at 784K context (!!) makes a big difference.

Aurornis 14 hours ago||
> The benchmark prompt was:

> Write a compact Python function that parses a unified diff and returns the changed file paths. Then explain two edge cases.

> Each benchmark generated about 128 tokens.

Generating 128 tokens is probably not enough for good benchmark results. MTP speedup depends on how often the predicted tokens are accepted. In my experience, the very early output has a higher acceptance rate, so short testing can give false positive speedups.

llama.cpp includes a tool specifically for benchmarking that will sweep the arguments for you so you don't have to restart the server and send it prompts:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/llam...

EDIT: Also the section about downloading the models should have mentioned that llama.cpp has a "-hf" argument that will download the models for you. I appreciate the author for sharing their experience, but for beginners this might not be the best guide to use.

freerunnering 6 hours ago||
> I appreciate the author for sharing their experience, but for beginners this might not be the best guide to use.

Yeah, I didn't write this as a proper developer guide. My screen recording started getting loads of favourites and I started getting messages asking about how I set it up, so just through up a quick rundown of how I setup this test.

I little just saw the Unclothe announcement about "Double the speed" and thought "Ha. I wonder if that will get it fast enough I'd actually be prepared to use it" and had a go at setting it up.

I'd done tests before last year with things like Devstral, but they were always both so slow and dumb, I didn't want to bother.

This finally hit the "wow, this is useable" level of both speed and intelligence.

liuliu 14 hours ago|||
Realistically, you need to experiment with any user prompt + a good amount of system prompt (at least > 1000 tokens, but realistically, in the range of 3000 tokens probably good).

llama.cpp includes tools for that, what you are looking at is to have a prefill before token generation to measure it properly. Increasingly also, measuring token generation speed at longer context (32k or 64k) is important too.

willXare 11 hours ago|||
At 128 tokens, you’re benchmarking the overture, not the opera.
lloyd-christmas 10 hours ago||
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reactordev 12 hours ago||
This is akin to saying “it runs on my machine” without actually examining the problem. Sad. You’re absolutely right that 128 tokens is nothing, it’s a little more than a hello response.
ig0r0 15 hours ago||
I wrote a similar post some time ago just used ollama and opencode https://blog.kulman.sk/running-local-llm-coding-server/
krzyk 2 hours ago||
Ollama is not a good choice - https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/

As for oprncode, doesn't the system prompt eat too much of the context? Local models are really constraint in regards contex, and opencode AFAIR uses a 10k of it or some thing close.

takethebus 14 hours ago|||
this is the way, given anyone could swap for oh my pi / pi / etc
mark_l_watson 12 hours ago||
yes, whether for home experiments or at work, it is good practice (good hygiene) to be able to swap out both agentic harnesses and models. It is important to have a good strategy for exporting skills, etc.
sleepybrett 14 hours ago||
actually useful and the ollama gui could probably even simplify this more.
c-hendricks 15 hours ago||
Not sure you really need huggingface-cli to download anything if you're just using llama.cpp. You can pass `-hf ...` and it will download the models for you. Set `LLAMA_CACHE` to change where the downloads go:

  LLAMA_CACHE="models" ./llama-server \
    -hf unsloth/gemma-4-31B-it-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL \
    ...
dofm 15 hours ago|
Yes.

-hfd for the draft model.

c-hendricks 15 hours ago||
Nice, was wondering if there was a flag for the draft as well.

Not knocking huggingface-cli, just find it's much easier for people to try out this stuff when they can just

  mise use --global github:ggml-org/llama.cpp
  LLAMA_CACHE="models" llama-server \
    -hf unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL \
    --host 0.0.0.0 \
    --port 11434 \
    ...
dofm 10 hours ago||

  —no-mmproj 
is also pretty useful if you're doing this just to try agentic coding and you're not processing images/voice. Stops it downloading the multimodal projector.
vladgur 14 hours ago||
I have used omlx.ai with great success to both download multiple mlx models (including gemma and qwen) suited for my hardware AND to be able to automagically launch both open-source and close-source (claude code, codex) harnesses using these models. All from a web or desktop UI

You would not need to follow a blog post with omlx IMHO

dofm 12 hours ago||
FWIW I have not, on a 64GB M1 Max, seen any advantage from oMLX specifically or MLX generally over GGUF with llama.cpp.

The Gemma 4 MLX builds I have found so far have been slower at the same quantisation and much slower with MTP.

The built-in web UI for llama.cpp is really quite good once you have chosen your model. Otherwise I quite like LM Studio for tinkering.

One thing I would say is that both Gemma-4 and Qwen 3.6 simply do not need a large chunk of the typical opencode system prompt. Better off without it.

fouc 3 hours ago||
what? you're saying both MLX and MTP have been slower for your mac?
amboo7 3 hours ago||
I also have an M1 Max 64GB: Qwen 3.6 benefits from MTP (after rounds of parameter optimization). MLX was unstable (haven't tried it recently), faster at TG but slower at PP, so inconclusive.
Dotnaught 13 hours ago|||
In case anyone is looking for a sandbox to go with oMLX and Pi: https://github.com/Dotnaught/pi-sandbox
dofm 12 hours ago|||
This is useful. I'm still tinkering with Multipass VMs because I need the whole VM environment anyway and I'm on Sequoia. But I'd be interested if you did anything like that with Apple's container CLI instead; sooner or later I will have to upgrade to Tahoe because I want to play with the container CLI (and apfel).
zmmmmm 10 hours ago|||
it looks handy but ...

    sbx policy set-default open
just so the single pi sandbox can talk to localhost? ... this gives me some grave doubts about the rest of it being set up well.
fridder 14 hours ago||
It truly is the SOTA for local inference on mac. Even when there are regressions the dev(s) are insanely responsive. It is the most impressive opensource project I've seen in a awhile
benbojangles 13 hours ago||
Omlx needs to incorporate macos native shortcuts use - macos can almost instantly extract text from pdfs and a bunch of other things using it's ane neural engine keeping unified ram for llm use. The two together would be awesome
jmkni 14 hours ago||
FYI you can open Claude code in the terminal, point it at this article and just tell it to "do it", if you're feeling extra lazy
echelon 14 hours ago|
This is the way.

I'm not Googling much of anything anymore. 9/10 times the information is awful, it's hard to parse out of whatever other spam it's surrounded by. Meanwhile, Claude will just do the thing one-shot or with a tiny bit of refinement.

The gateway to knowledge and getting stuff done is the LLM.

Google Search is a dinosaur.

It feels like we're living a century into the future. Not even smartphones were this cool.

kingofthehill98 14 hours ago|||
Yeah, if the future is "Claude, think for me" I'm happy to stay at the good old present.
echelon 14 hours ago|||
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F

https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/when-educators-mo...

New decade, same old argument.

It's not

> "Claude, think for me"

It's

> "Claude, be my subordinate and get this done for me"

Instead of complaining on the sidelines, I'm getting a shit ton of work done.

ultrarunner 13 hours ago|||
For what it's worth, even this reply reads like LLM output. It's not "quote describing the scenario", it's "some other linked-in-coded plot twist". If you're the average of the people you spend the most time around, and you spend the most time around a chatbot, do you start to absorb its speech patterns and logic structures?

Yeah, good ol' present for me too then, thanks.

wwweston 11 hours ago||||
As one famous agent said: “I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about.”

An argument can be as old as the search engine and hold real value. There are ways in which unreflective search engine use has misled and mistrained people.

There’s always been argument to be had about how we manage and offload attention, what we gain and what we lose when resistance is reduced. It’s part of reflection that’s been necessary in order to make progress solid ground, and is more necessary with non-deterministic tech.

The phrase “Tactical tornados” may be older than web search and describes people who also got a lot done.

Models can be incredibly helpful boosters and situationally effective subordinates… and also patchy as a real engineering IC or org.

coldtea 1 hour ago||||
The argument was correct then (Google/social did make us more stupid) and correct now regarding AI. So not sure why pointing out it was said before is relevant. Except as an example of its prescience.

>"Claude, be my subordinate and get this done for me"

Since "this" is thinking, then the two formulations are equivalent.

>Instead of complaining on the sidelines, I'm getting a shit ton of work done.

Until you no longer have a job and are drowned in slop.

sdevonoes 13 hours ago||||
> I'm getting a shit ton of work done.

It’s weird when people are proud of doing ton of work. Im the opposite, Im proud that Im doing minimal stuff without llms.

this_user 13 hours ago|||
> Instead of complaining on the sidelines, I'm getting a shit ton of work done.

Nah, you are just producing a bunch of slop and hope that nobody notices.

coldtea 1 hour ago||||
>It feels like we're living a century into the future.

The WALL-E chair-people future.

tobyhinloopen 14 hours ago|||
Claude “respond in a friendly way that I agree with this comment”
dofm 15 hours ago||
Useful stuff in here that I wish I'd seen a few days ago :-)

I am not convinced that the MTP setup for the QAT model adds very much in terms of speed on my M1 Max, but it is definitely worth experimenting with.

Fiddling about with local models has done so much for my conceptual understanding of what is going on.

FWIW and YMMV but I also found the Gemma 4 MTP head was occasionally breaking markup in Opencode, causing the thinking to display untidily and ultimately in some cases missing the stop token. So I've stopped using MTP there for now.

Recent Qwen 3.6 models have developer role support so it will occasionally surprise you with a structured multiple choice questionnaire.

mft_ 15 hours ago||
I found a marginal downside to Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MTP vs. the non-MTP equivalent on an M1 Max. I’ll maybe experiment with settings further though.
freehorse 14 hours ago|||
And the upsides of using draft models for MOE models with so low number of active parameters (as here or as in the article) are quite low, compared to dense models where you can get enormous speedups. I would prefer running the dense 27b models with speculative decoding instead.
dofm 13 hours ago||
That is what I have learned, yes. Not tested the dense Qwen yet. IIRC the 31B Gemma was slow enough that I doubt MTP will help me much.
dofm 14 hours ago|||
Yeah. I think it might speed up time to first token but I am not sure how much that matters.

I do enjoy their different personalities when they are tackling "explain this" type puzzles, though.

Gemma writes so well — like a concise code blogger. It makes you understand that the thing we hate about AI slop writing is specifically the cheesy, marketingese sycophantic ChatGPT tone. It's a choice to sound that way.

Qwen writes more tersely by default, like much english language documentation in Chinese open source projects. A couple of lines, code example, fact, code example, line of blurb.

I use this prompt every now and then with a new model. It's obviously a classic SQL puzzle but I've asked new web developers this in the past (prompted by discovering that a client's subcontractor didn't understand it and was therefore unable to migrate some code from relying on dodgy pre-MySQL 5.x behaviours)

—

  I have a MySQL 5 table like this: [id, label, category, score].   It contains a list of items in different categories (text names like cat1, cat2, cat3) with a numerical score. Is there a way I can write a SQL query to find the item in each category that has the highest score, without using a subquery? No two entries in any category share a score.
—

I enjoy seeing what it deduces from the subtext.

Without "thinking" mode on, they always initially fail and you need to prompt them to find the answer. With thinking mode, they both produce really nice explanations.

For me, as an old freelancer who is pretty cynical about vibe coding or "agentic engineering", what I really want is an AI tool that can help me start to solve problems and help me find the right terminology or generate some boilerplate I can tinker with. Both of these models do fine at the kind of "starter" writing that I want when I am trying to untangle an idea.

mark_l_watson 12 hours ago||
when I started using QAT recently, I stopped trying to improve my configuration after that. I will try tuning my local environment again in a few months, but with QAT things are good enough for now.
reddit_clone 15 hours ago||
>64 GB

Thats the rub. I have an M4 with 48G. I wonder if it is worth testing this out.

My past attempts (with Ollama and various LLMs) were too slow to use.

hkchad 14 hours ago||
I have a M5 MAX with 128, local models are toys compared to hosted ones. I've spent a lot of time and money trying to make it work even 1/2 as well.
jillesvangurp 3 hours ago|||
From an economical point of view, there's almost no point to using these locally running models. The only things they are good for would be dirt cheap using the smaller/older models via some API as well. Recovering the investment for the hundreds/thousands you spend extra on hardware easily funds a lot of that. Unless you are using this stuff at scale, it's probably not going to be worth it.

I've dabbled with Qwen 3.x and Gemma 4 models a bit. They are alright but not that impressive. And my mac gets super hot if I use them for extended periods of time. It's just not very nice to use locally.

dofm 11 hours ago||||
It all depends on what you want to do, I guess.

If you're seeking the kind of hands-off claude experience, obviously not. They are slow.

If you want to learn how these things work, train them locally, tinker, play with the code, grasp the fundamentals, or just out of sheer bloody-mindedness and principle refuse to tether the functioning of your application to a cloud API...

iluvcommunism 14 hours ago|||
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c0rruptbytes 2 hours ago|||
i’m running m4 pro 48gb right now

omlx + gemma 12b 6 bit + pi

it’s feasible for sure

MoEs for speed (qwen 35b, cohere 30b, gemma 26b)

Dense for more methodical work (qwen 27b [reigning champ], gemma 31b, gemma 12b)

MoE i recommend 5bit+

Dense i think 4 bit is okay

Play with your context size, you don’t really need that much, have lazy loading for tools and mcps

my pi extensions for anyone looking for a skinny quick setup, i have use `--no-skills` right now too:

    "npm:pi-codex-goal",
    "npm:pi-simplify",
    "npm:pi-mcp-adapter",
    "git:github.com/elpapi42/pi-minimal-subagent",
    "npm:@wierdbytes/pi-statusline",
    "npm:@aliou/pi-guardrails",
    "npm:pi-lens",
    "npm:@juicesharp/rpiv-todo",
    "npm:pi-hashline-readmap",
    "npm:@mrclrchtr/supi-review",
    "npm:pi-cmux",
    "npm:@mrclrchtr/supi-context",
    "npm:pi-tool-search"

think of local models as "zero sugar" models and that's where we're at right now. I think it's crazy how good these models are compared to last year's frontier models
krzyk 1 hour ago|||
People are using 3090 (24GB) to run models, and it is the most cost effective way to run the. Yes, it is 2x faster, but memory wise you surely can spend 24gb on llm.

Also there are smaller, still usefull models that can run on 8GB or less.

dofm 12 hours ago|||
Some of these models will be a bit of a squeeze at Q4_0 I suspect; almost certainly they will be using CPU. Probably the 31B Gemma will be too much. Maybe not the Gemma-4 26B QAT.

But if you just want to play around rather than code, you really might find the Gemma 4 12B model worth mucking about with just so you've gone through the steps. Especially if you want to muck about with image analysis or audio transcription.

If you're writing PHP I think you could even find it good enough. I've been modestly surprised. You can do that basic fiddling with the Edge AI Gallery app, which can enable thinking and has a customisable system prompt and some agent support.

You could also try the 14B Deepseek R1.

Honestly even if it is not good enough, if you are anything like me, I think you'll find that going through this process is really quite educational — it has made a lot of things more concrete for me in a way that I have found reassuring and valuable.

codazoda 14 hours ago|||
I'm running an M3 on an Air with just 16GB. I can still get useful results without an internet connection in "chat mode". It's a different experience than using Claude, for sure, but it's workable. I typically use the Qwen variants these days.
mark_l_watson 12 hours ago||
This might be useful when ‘coding in chat mode’: I have a few scripts that I run in a project directory that takes a prompt from me, and creates a single long one-shot prompt that I can paste into a chat window and ask that any generating code is inside markdown code blocks for easier copy/pasting. Also, pardon the plug, but you can read my new tiny book free online that documents my experiences using agentic coding on my 16G Mac and my 32G Mac: https://leanpub.com/read/local-coding-agents
codazoda 12 hours ago||
Looks cool, I’ll checkout the book. Your download links (PDF and EPUB) are down for me.

> NoSuchKeyThe specified key does not exist…

contingencies 13 hours ago||
M4 24GB here. You'll be fine, if you're anything like me minor latency is acceptable to obtain (a) privacy (b) reliability (c) CI/CD/guardrails (d) network independence (e) future-proofing vs. AIaaS. https://omlx.ai/ gives you intelligent local hardware based model download recommendations. That said it probably depends heavily on your workload, process and polish expectations. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48089091
spike021 7 hours ago||
what are you using on yours? I've got a M4 Pro 24GB also. tried the open source gpt one. it's alright but I found it can get stuck at times. maybe just my config in LM Studio.
jumploops 9 hours ago||
I've been quite impressed with DeepSeek v4 Flash running via antirez's ds4[0].

It feels like a GPT-4 class model in terms of "stored knowledge" but is better at long-horizon tool calling than any of the GPT-4 class models.

Running on a 128GB MBP M4 Max, I'm getting ~24 t/s on generation and ~200 t/s on prefill. I was expecting it to feel slow, and it certainly does when e.g. generating code, but it's surprisingly useful as a "machine orchestrator" for simple tasks.

For non-agentic usecases, it's a decent enough model to converse with, and has the benefit of being entirely self-contained/private.

[0]https://github.com/antirez/ds4

hmontazeri 5 hours ago|
I use LM Studio with the local server it ships and connect it to opencode. Takes 2 min to setup
godfathermway 2 hours ago|
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