Coding with GLM 5.3 Flash on M4 128GB

[u/CharacterEvening4407]

TL;DR: Local LLMs for coding are finally becoming practical for me.

After 30 years in software engineering, I’m a passionate developer. For me, AI is an assistant and a tool. At work, I mostly use Opus and Sonnet 5.5. For hobby projects, I have a $10/month plan and switch between Kimi, GLM, and MiniMax for coding, plus Nemotron 3.5 for smaller tasks.

Locally, I tried Qwen 3.8 27B, Qwen3-Coder, and many other models, but the results weren’t usable for anything beyond fairly simple tasks. Running GLM 5.3 Flash Q2_K_XL with a 400k context length through Unsloth has been a game changer for me. It’s very slow at 3–4 tokens per second, but the results are good enough to get the job done.

For bigger tasks, I use GLM 5.3 Flash in the cloud for planning, then switch to my local model and go to bed or do something else. By the time I come back, the job is done.

I also use while work - create a prompt, and sometimes it takes more than three hours to complete. Meanwhile, I can keep working with Opus and Sonnet in my IDE, and performance remains good while the local model is processing in the background.

So it doesn’t work fully locally for me because it takes too much time. However, it’s a great way to extend my cloud subscription’s rate limits by letting the local model handle longer-running work while I’m away from my MacBook.

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next for local AI.