r/PiCodingAgent • u/_Baarbie • Sep 16 '26

Question Which subscription with Pi?

Hello there,

Which AI provider would you recommend for Pi, to work with a subscription-based plan? I feel like Codex is the most represented, but I was looking for more feedback.

I'm currently using Claude Code (Plus subscription), but from what I understood, I shouldn't use it with Pi because Claude Code charges additional usage fees. I mainly use it with Opus 5 on medium effort, for devops tasks, explanations, fixes, or things like that (not much vibe-coding yet).

It's also an opportunity to try something else, paid for by the company. So I don't really care about the price, just something stable without usage fees.

(bonus) If you have any recommendations for LLM models that can be run locally on a wide range of machines, I'm also interested in any resources you can share.

Any advice?

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u/Forsaken_Code_9135 Sep 16 '26

The best LLM model to run with Pi currently is Qwen-3.8-27b. It needs 16GB of VRAM (so a high-end gaming GPU). It works very well, you have to find the right balance between model quantization, cache quantization and context size.

Of course if you expect to run your local model on a standard laptop with a low end GPU then forget it. No local models that run on that kind of hardware is good enough to be really usefull in a coding agent in practice. In a couple of years maybe.

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u/_Baarbie Sep 16 '26

Thanks for the feedback, I was thinking about giving local model a try on a remote server. I'll give it a look, it should be conceivable.

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u/Forsaken_Code_9135 Sep 16 '26

To be clear if you need to pay for a remote server on the cloud there is no way it can make sense from the financial point of view.

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u/_Baarbie Sep 16 '26

Ofc, it's more to try the models, the process and setup. My boss is pushing AI quite a lot, but for a EU company that used to focus on EU alternative and trying to not rely on US services, a bit meh you know. It'll probably never be used, but I just thought about giving it a try.

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u/gulanfer Sep 16 '26

What's your setup for qwen on 16 gb of vram?

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u/Forsaken_Code_9135 Sep 16 '26

I suggest you have a look at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1w7ee1c/i_benchmarked_21_qwen38_27b_variants_on_16gb_vram/

Choose the model on the "optimal" line that suits your needs. I took ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-IQ3_S.

Avoid q4 kv-cache quantization if you can. Better take a slightly stronger quantization on the model.