Running local models is good now

I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now. I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used Mistral 7B Gemma 3 OpenAI OSS-20B Qwen 3 MOE, as well as a number of other Qwen variants like Qwen 2.5 Coder across a lot of different system setups like raw llama.cpp with Open WebUI llama-cpp-python Ollama llamafiles and LM Studio Where are local models now? Early on, models were slow, hard to use, and just not that accurate for most programming tasks. The idea that local models were severely lagging behind was largely true until, for me, the release of GPT-OSS. I have no concrete scientific evidence of this - my own personal vibe metric of “is a model good enough” is, “do I have to double-check it against an API model”, and GPT-OSS was the first one where I started doing that a lot less often. As a result, I’ve mostly been using local models as fast, personalized Google for development questions that don’t require…