I’d like to set up a local coding assistant so that I can stop using Google to ask complex questions to for search results.
I really don’t know what I’m doing or if there’s anything that’s available that respects privacy. I don’t necessarily trust search results for this kind of query either.
I want to run it on my desktop, Ryzen 7 5800xt + Radeon RX 6950xt + 32gb of RAM. I don’t need or expect data center performance out of this thing. I’m also a strict Sublime user so I’d like to avoid VS Code suggestions as much as possible.
My coding laptop is an oooooold MacBook Air so I’d like something that can be ran on my desktop and used from my laptop if possible. No remote access needed, just to use from the same home network.
Something like LM Studio and Qwen sounds like it’s what I’m looking for, but since I’m unfamiliar with what exists I figured I would ask for Lemmy’s opinion.
Is LM Studio + Qwen a good combo for my needs? Are there alternatives?
I’m on Lemmy Connect and can’t see comments from other instances when I’m logged in, but to whomever melted down from this question your relief is in my very first sentence:
to ask complex questions to for search results.
You must log in or # to comment.
Qwen coder model from Huggingface, following the instructions there to run it in llama.cpp. Once that’s up: OpenCode and use the custom OpenAI API to connect it.
You’ll get far better results than trying to use other local options out of the box.
There may be better models potentially but I’ve found Qwen 2.5 etc to be pretty fantastic overall, and definitely a fine option beside Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini. I’ve tested the lot and it’s usually far more down to instruction and AGENTS.md instructions/layout than it is down to just the model.
Do you mind sharing your agents md?
I recommend llama.cpp instead of LM Studio.
LM Studio in combination with Kilo Code for IDE integration works pretty nicely locally. Here is a good video covering the basics to get you going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp5EwOogWEw
I’ve not found them useful yet for more than basic things. I tried Ollama, it let’s you run locally, has simple setup, stays out of the way.
“Self-hosted mind atrophy with skills degradation running in parallel.”
No. Absolutely no. You should code with your mind, and stay creative.Related: Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer
Straight up vibe coding is a horrible idea, but I’ll happily take tools to reduce mundane tasks.
The project I’m currently working on leans on Temporal for durable execution. We define the activities and workflows in protobufs and utilize codegen for all the boring boiler plate stuff. The project hasa number of http endpoints that are again defined in protos, along with their inputs and outputs. Again, lots of code gen. Is code gen making me less creative or degrading my skills? I don’t think so. It sure makes the output more consistent and reduces the opportunity for errors.
If I engage gen AI during development, which isn’t very often, my prompts are very targeted and the scope is narrow. However, I’ve found that gen AI is great for writing and modifying tests and with a little prompting you can get pretty solid unit test coverage for a verity of different scenarios. In the case of the software I write at work the creativity is in the actual code and the unit tests are often pretty repetitive (happy path, bad input 1…n, no result, mock an error at this step, etc). Once you know how to do that there’s no reason not to offload it IMO.
