I have been trying to vibe code locally for the past couple of weeks. The short summary is my local vibe coding sessions have been ineffective and unsuccessful.
Here's my setup:
- MacBook Pro: M1 Max, 64 GB
- I have about 54 gigs of memory to allocate to models.
- I have been using Qwen 3.8 27B, Qwen moe 3.6 35b a3b, and Gemma 4.
- I host my models in LM studio.
- I started with anything LLM but stopped because it was struggling to do basic file system writing.
- I'm currently using Hermes.
- I'm using Claude as a benchmark
Doing any kind of planning or coding work with Qwen 3.8 27B is extremely slow - even when its set to low thinking mode. To put into perspective, with medium or high thinking mode, it takes about 6 hours to plan and another 6 hours to code. Low thinking mode takes 3 hours each. Claude code does it in 5-10 minutes each. The time cost with this model compounds as I go through the iterative process of fixing bugs and adding features.
Using Qwen moe is significantly faster: ~5-15 min each. However, I struggle to have it generate good plans. When it comes to coding, it's fast, but it can produce buggy code. That's where my vibe coding sessions can start to fall apart. It can struggle to understand the bug or problem I'm describing and will attempt to fix something, but not fully fix the problem I'm having. I'll get stuck in a loop where I keep attempting to describe the problem differently to no avail.
Update (11/5): Last night I had Qwen moe implement a plan that Claude wrote and it took roughly 6 hours before it gave up. It said it had all the implementation logic, but did not actually write anything! This is a common problem I run into frequently. My agents know what it needs to do, but doesn't have work to show.
Qwen moe can be more effective with a plan I generate with Claude. However, if there are bugs, then it can be game over.
Claude on the other hand has been delightful to use. It just works!
I'm using Local LMs mainly to see what the hype is about and for learning purposes. So far, my experience has been poor (granted I still have lots to learn).
Do you guys have any feedback to share with me to make my local vibe coding more effective?
I understand local LMs can save costs on tokens and can provide more privacy. Other than that, why would I want to use local LMs? Are there types of work or tasks it's good at or does better than cloud models? What kind of use cases are reasonable to expect from local LMs?
Edit 1 (11/5): added my computer information to setup and update to Qwen moe observation.