Running local models is good now | ✰Vicki Boykis✰ Running local models is good now<br>Jun 15 2026<br>I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now.<br>I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used<br>Mistral 7B<br>Gemma 3<br>OpenAI OSS-20B<br>Qwen 3 MOE, as well as a number of other Qwen variants like Qwen 2.5 Coder<br>across a lot of different system setups like<br>raw llama.cpp with Open WebUI<br>llama-cpp-python<br>Ollama<br>llamafiles and<br>LM Studio<br>Where are local models now?<br>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.<br>As a result, I’ve mostly been using local models as fast, personalized Google for development questions that don’t require recency.<br>But with the most recent releases from Google in the Gemma 4, family, I’ve finally been able to do agentic coding locally and have loops work at about ~75% the accuracy/speed of frontier models, which is incredible.<br>I’ve so far been using gemma-4-26b-a4b LM Studio implementation as my default local model. I’ve used the local setup so far to: Refactor a Python script that was a notebook into a repo of 5-6 modules, lint that module to use correct type hints for generics (most frontier models now do this automatically, but not always).<br>I’ve also used it to proofread some blog posts, write unit tests, and to bootstrap a repo that stands up a two-tower model for recommendations just to see what the agent would do with a blank slate. Here’s what it generated, which was pretty basic but still beyond the scope of anything I would have thought possible last year:<br>Note that the environment is restricted because I run all my agentic workflows in a Docker container with limited access to execution.<br>I’m also building an app that surfaces trending topics from Arxiv papers. Out of curiosity, I had Pi go through my past LM Studio session logs and figure out what I was using LM Studio for:<br>Unsurprisingly, since I’ve been working on Rijksearch,<br>None of these are groundbreaking tasks (again, a lot of personalized Google/docs lookups), and working on them does give my GPUs and RAM a workout and the K-V cache grows to 64 GB RAM.<br>But, the larger story for me is that these kinds of tasks, even as simple as they are, used to be impossible for local models as recently as 6 months ago.<br>Gemma-4-12b-qat just came out but I’ve already also really been impressed with its performance relative to its size. The model architecture itself is really interesting and proposes a bunch of interesting questions like, “if we are constrained by performance and price, what architectural tradeoffs do we need to make?” a question that so far has not really been asked in the mad token gold rush.<br>Running agentic models locally today<br>But don’t take my word for any of this, try it out for yourself! You’ll need a local model inference engine, an agentic harness, and the local model artifact if you want to try to run local agentic flows. You’ll need to set up the harness to point at your local inference endpoint, the downloaded model artifact served via the inference engine.<br>For my local setup, I’m currently using Pi as the agent harness and LM Studio as the inference server, although it would likely be faster if I just used llama.cpp directly - a potential direction for a future experiment.<br>This post was very easy to follow to set up agentic coding with Pi and LM Studio, although I did make a few tweaks to the post’s setup.<br>Model: The post recommends Gemma 26B A4B , but gemma-4-12b-qat is more recent and smaller and faster, without much sacrifice in accuracy.<br>Security: I run every Pi session in a Docker container and give it permissions only to bash so that it can’t run Python code or do web browsing, although I do plan to allow curl in a different image for some research work I’m doing.<br>Agent Harness Config: Since I run everything in Docker, I edited Pi’s models.json in order to get Pi to talk to the model.<br>"lmstudio": {<br>"baseUrl": "http://host.docker.internal:1234/v1",<br>"api": "openai-completions",<br>"apiKey": "not-needed",<br>"models": [<br>"id": "google/gemma-4-12b-qat",<br>"input": [<br>"text",<br>"image"
Here’s my Docker Compose config:<br>services:<br>pi:<br>build:<br>context: .<br>dockerfile: Dockerfile<br>image: pi-agent:0.74.0<br>init: true<br>stdin_open: true<br>tty: true<br>extra_hosts:<br>- "host.docker.internal:host-gateway"<br>environment:<br>ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: ${ANTHROPIC_API_KEY:-}<br>OPENAI_API_KEY: ${OPENAI_API_KEY:-not-needed}<br>GEMINI_API_KEY:...