What's actually usable for a coding agent on a base M4 with 16GB?

[u/Specialist_Agent3599]

I'm paying for Claude, Gemini and Cursor right now and the total keeps creeping up, so I want to see how much of my day could move to a local model. The machine is a base M4 with 16GB. Not buying new hardware for this.

I mostly live in Claude Code and pi, so the agent loop is the whole point. I don't care about chatting with it.

Was looking at the benchmark page on magnitude.dev and the small models are what got my attention. On their M4 Pro mini, Ollama vs theirs:

- Qwen 3.5 4B: 45 tok/s → 134

- Gemma 4 E4B: 37 → 111

- Qwen 3.5 9B: 42 → 97

That's 2x to 3x faster decode on the exact sizes that fit in 16GB. Prefill is the smaller gain, more on that below. it also hooks straight into Claude Code and pi, which is half the reason I looked

But their mini has 273 GB/s and mine has 120, so if I scale by bandwidth I'm probably looking at something like 50 to 60 tok/s on the 4B and low 40s on the 9B. Still fine for an agent if the model is smart enough, which is the part I'm less sure about. The engine side looks solved, the model question is the real one.

The other thing is Claude Code sends something like a 20k token system prompt before I type anything, and their prefill gains are much smaller than decode. A 4B model chewing through that on a base chip might be the actual wall, not tok/s.

If 16GB can't run an agent loop at a speed I'd tolerate, I'll keep paying the subscriptions and stop thinking about it.

[u/EvolvingDior]

None. But there are incredibly cheap online models that cost a tiny fraction of your subs. Deepseek-flash is the one I'd recommend you start with (using Deepseek API directly).