I’ve spent the last month or so using nothing but a local 27B Qwen model as my coding assistant and it’s working fine. The big American AI companies could all collapse in ruins tomorrow and it’s not going to slow things down all that much, anyone who wants to use AI will be able to continue using it. Might even be better in the long run if that happens - the people who are scared of ASI will get their much-demanded temporary slowdown at the frontier while everyone else catches up with open-weight models that everyone can use without central control.
The kind of specs that would enable local LLM usage were available on laptops since 2020. The floor for acceptable performance for LLMs stopped literally just before 24+gb of VRAM would have become pretty common in consumer applications. The reason this technology isn’t more ubiquitously available is because ‘they’ thought it would be more profitable to hoover up literally every byte of RAM and GPU in the world rather than let the technology continue to naturally evolve to a place where any consumer could have run useful models on their home computers. In other words, your anger is misplaced.
Open models will still be available via API from third-party hosts. The bigger ones like Kimi K3 or GLM 5.3 don’t fit on conventional desktop computers to begin with, most non-institutional users of those would already be doing that (eg via OpenRouter).
There’s not much skill to be had there - It is literally just downloading an app nowadays if you do not want to do anything special, especially on Linux (Newelle is great stuff!). But I am sure there are similar packages available for Windows too.
Excuse my ignorance - I don’t have much experience with AI to this point - but what does Newelle have that something like Unsloth or LMStudio does not? What makes it great stuff?
honestly? ease of use. I like Unsloth too, but Newelle is really an easy solution if you just want to use LLMs on you own hardware (or use inference providers) that requires practically no knowledge at all - it is focused on providing something to use LLMs without anything else interfering.
Unsloth does well too, but if i hadn’t learnt as much as i already did when i started using it, i would probably have been overwhelmed (outside of it crashing pathetically when following symlinks for local model selection - you can define these directories, but the quick selection then just makes it crash)
Np. I actually use Newelle with an fork of llama.cpp that introduces the ability to use ternary models - these work a lot better under tight memory constraints, and achieve performance similar to models with 2-3 times the parameters. Was as easy as installing the fork, starting it and pointing Newelle there instead of the integrated llama.cpp. You can do that with Unsloth too of course, but it’s not that smooth.
Wanted to refactor a too large and hectic hacked together state machine into separate functions and reduce redundancy and increase code readability
Every model I’ve tried failed.
And that should be an easy task an actual AI should be able to handle.
Logic is done, just translate to a different structure.
That should be exactly what they are able to do at least.
None worked, because the project is just to big and interlinked.
I’ve got 24GB of VRAM, which helps a lot. I’m using the Q4_K_M version of this model, with the KV cache quantized to Q8, and that’s able to get me to 128000 tokens of context. I’m using the Qwen Code harness in VS Code.
If 128000 tokens still isn’t enough, break the task down into smaller chunks and help the harness out with MCP tools - I installed Codebase Memory to help it navigate large codebases more efficiently, for example. Ask the coding agent what’s causing problems and it may be able to help identify solutions too, I’ve had it troubleshoot itself several times now and it’s been quite good at inspecting its own settings and finding where the problems are with them. I even installed Firecrawl for it so it can do its own web searches.
More Ram, and break stuff up into smaller pieces. I Have 12Gb of VRAM and 64 Gig System Ram, which - with CPU offloading - allows pretty large models to be used at acceptable speed (although probably not fast enough for someone who wants to make his living with it. But these also will invest in dedicated hardware). And i let a larger model sit there to coordinate, and let it use subagents for the rest. That keeps the Context for the main model a lot more manageable and keeps it on track for a pretty long time.
How you structure the Task is more important than what the task is at all. For example, i have a huge list of games to be catalogued, and just telling the model to search the web and fill in the blanks in the database makes it crap out pretty soon. But I tell it to let subagents handle everything regarding web search and data extraction and just let them hand back the resulting data. the main model then calls another subagent to sanity check the data and update the database. Each of these subagents do not run for long, and therefor never run out of context, while the main model can keep context size manageable because it does not have to work with “messy” data at all.
I run a 5 bit quantized Qwen 3.8 27b at home on a gaming PC with an RX 7900 XTX and RAG memory using Gemma MoE (i forget what one)running on an old 1080 ti on my Valheim server.
It takes 3-15 minutes to run depending on how many tool calls the model makes and that’s mostly memory or web scrapes since that runs on the slower hardware. I mostly just use it as a discord bot to look stuff up for me and to fetch the news.
Probably not, or if it runs it may take hours or days to get a full output. VRAM on the GPU really decides what will run reasonably. Try an 8 billion parameter phone sized model and see if its faster than sending a letter, then keep moving up until your setup can’t handle it.
8B models are a bit too dumb to use any tools reliably but should handle a basic conversation. llama cpp will allow you to manually load a model and tweak settings.
I’ve spent the last month or so using nothing but a local 27B Qwen model as my coding assistant and it’s working fine. The big American AI companies could all collapse in ruins tomorrow and it’s not going to slow things down all that much, anyone who wants to use AI will be able to continue using it. Might even be better in the long run if that happens - the people who are scared of ASI will get their much-demanded temporary slowdown at the frontier while everyone else catches up with open-weight models that everyone can use without central control.
Pity about the economy in the meantime, I guess.
Anyone who’s privileged enough to have the hardware.
The kind of specs that would enable local LLM usage were available on laptops since 2020. The floor for acceptable performance for LLMs stopped literally just before 24+gb of VRAM would have become pretty common in consumer applications. The reason this technology isn’t more ubiquitously available is because ‘they’ thought it would be more profitable to hoover up literally every byte of RAM and GPU in the world rather than let the technology continue to naturally evolve to a place where any consumer could have run useful models on their home computers. In other words, your anger is misplaced.
Yeah the cross over point right now sis somewhere between qwen3.8 27b and glm 5.2/5.3
Like qwen is so close to being good.
What’s your assumption about where my anger is directed?
Open models will still be available via API from third-party hosts. The bigger ones like Kimi K3 or GLM 5.3 don’t fit on conventional desktop computers to begin with, most non-institutional users of those would already be doing that (eg via OpenRouter).
Anyone who lacks the skill to to it themselves…
There’s not much skill to be had there - It is literally just downloading an app nowadays if you do not want to do anything special, especially on Linux (Newelle is great stuff!). But I am sure there are similar packages available for Windows too.
Excuse my ignorance - I don’t have much experience with AI to this point - but what does Newelle have that something like Unsloth or LMStudio does not? What makes it great stuff?
honestly? ease of use. I like Unsloth too, but Newelle is really an easy solution if you just want to use LLMs on you own hardware (or use inference providers) that requires practically no knowledge at all - it is focused on providing something to use LLMs without anything else interfering.
Unsloth does well too, but if i hadn’t learnt as much as i already did when i started using it, i would probably have been overwhelmed (outside of it crashing pathetically when following symlinks for local model selection - you can define these directories, but the quick selection then just makes it crash)
Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to answer.
Np. I actually use Newelle with an fork of llama.cpp that introduces the ability to use ternary models - these work a lot better under tight memory constraints, and achieve performance similar to models with 2-3 times the parameters. Was as easy as installing the fork, starting it and pointing Newelle there instead of the integrated llama.cpp. You can do that with Unsloth too of course, but it’s not that smooth.
(if you are interested: https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/collections for the ternary models, https://github.com/PrismML-Eng/llama.cpp for the build that allows for ternary models.)
Thanks, I appreciate it. Had not heard of these before.
I’m always running into context limit problems
Wanted to refactor a too large and hectic hacked together state machine into separate functions and reduce redundancy and increase code readability
Every model I’ve tried failed.
And that should be an easy task an actual AI should be able to handle. Logic is done, just translate to a different structure.
That should be exactly what they are able to do at least.
None worked, because the project is just to big and interlinked.
I’ve got 24GB of VRAM, which helps a lot. I’m using the Q4_K_M version of this model, with the KV cache quantized to Q8, and that’s able to get me to 128000 tokens of context. I’m using the Qwen Code harness in VS Code.
If 128000 tokens still isn’t enough, break the task down into smaller chunks and help the harness out with MCP tools - I installed Codebase Memory to help it navigate large codebases more efficiently, for example. Ask the coding agent what’s causing problems and it may be able to help identify solutions too, I’ve had it troubleshoot itself several times now and it’s been quite good at inspecting its own settings and finding where the problems are with them. I even installed Firecrawl for it so it can do its own web searches.
More Ram, and break stuff up into smaller pieces. I Have 12Gb of VRAM and 64 Gig System Ram, which - with CPU offloading - allows pretty large models to be used at acceptable speed (although probably not fast enough for someone who wants to make his living with it. But these also will invest in dedicated hardware). And i let a larger model sit there to coordinate, and let it use subagents for the rest. That keeps the Context for the main model a lot more manageable and keeps it on track for a pretty long time.
How you structure the Task is more important than what the task is at all. For example, i have a huge list of games to be catalogued, and just telling the model to search the web and fill in the blanks in the database makes it crap out pretty soon. But I tell it to let subagents handle everything regarding web search and data extraction and just let them hand back the resulting data. the main model then calls another subagent to sanity check the data and update the database. Each of these subagents do not run for long, and therefor never run out of context, while the main model can keep context size manageable because it does not have to work with “messy” data at all.
What kind of hardware do you need to run a model like that? And what do you use :-) ?
I run a 5 bit quantized Qwen 3.8 27b at home on a gaming PC with an RX 7900 XTX and RAG memory using Gemma MoE (i forget what one)running on an old 1080 ti on my Valheim server.
It takes 3-15 minutes to run depending on how many tool calls the model makes and that’s mostly memory or web scrapes since that runs on the slower hardware. I mostly just use it as a discord bot to look stuff up for me and to fetch the news.
Sabata, goddess of computing, can I run it on a 32GB system with a 4GB nVidia GPU?
Probably not, or if it runs it may take hours or days to get a full output. VRAM on the GPU really decides what will run reasonably. Try an 8 billion parameter phone sized model and see if its faster than sending a letter, then keep moving up until your setup can’t handle it.
8B models are a bit too dumb to use any tools reliably but should handle a basic conversation.
llama cpp will allow you to manually load a model and tweak settings.
unsloth will give you a basic setup with some tools, manage model downloads, and settings.
deleted by creator