Depends on what you mean by "local". On your Macbook, large dense models like Qwen 3.6 27B will be slow, sure. On a local workstation with a dedicated RTX card you can get > 100 tps, which is more than good enough to work with it, and faster than cloud models in many cases.
It is smart enough that I use for all my coding tasks, and a lot of other mundane tasks.
It is probably not smart enough for "design this whole architecture of this complex system from scratch, make no mistakes", but that is not something I want from a coding tool anyway. I want a model that I can point to a file and tell it to make some changes to the file and related files. Or that I can ask to review a PR with regards to certain aspects.
My suggestion is to simply try it and see what it feels like.
Quantized Gemma 4 26B is as smart or better than GPT 5 in most of my testing. Granted GPT 5 is nearly a year old at this point, but I can run Gemma 4 on a ~6 year old consumer GPU (RTX 3090) and get 140 t/s.
I find devstral (even though it’s weak generally) much better at writing and documentation than Opus. I’m actually now delegating all documentation to devstral and away from Claude, which makes a mess.
A highly skilled carpenter may be able to 'get work done' by banging nails in with a heavy-bottomed cocktail glass, doesn't mean it's not painful to do so when it is continuously breaking and leaving shards of glass all over the workshop for you to find every day for the rest of your life until you clean up the mess you made using the wrong tool for the job.
More like, a highly-skilled carpenter can work miracles with a $6 hammer from the hardware store, while the pros on the commercial crew are using fancy compressed-air tools.
The carpenter has to get up close and personal with the wood. He can't match the crew's throughput, but maybe that's not what he's trying to do.
I would say the hammer is no AI. Local models are the cheapest XKGYAGH electric nailer on Amazon that "works" but jams up all the time. The $20/mo cloud models are a nice DeWalt that gives an hour of jam-free operation but takes five hours to recharge. And if someone else is paying for it, one can use the heavy duty nail gun with a big generator and compressor on a trailer that can run all day.
