Recent models (Qwen 3.6 and Gemma) can really do coding locally. Feels like SOTA from maybe a year ago? But you would want about 32-40GB total memory. 24GB is just a bit short of that. A gaming PC with 16GB graphics card and 32GB RAM brings you very close to a usable coding system.
I would recommend to start withQwen 3.6 35B at maybe Q5, it should be fast in that setup. For intelligence Qwen 3.7 27b, is smarter but will run much more slow. Others also mention gemma 4, which might be worth a try.
For those who want a GUI, LM Studio does this too (with llama.cpp as the backend I think). I'm getting great (albeit slow) results with Qwen3.6-35B MoE on 8GB GPU RAM, 40GB system RAM.
