Comment by anonzzzies
19 hours ago
I was sitting in an airplane next to a guy on a MacBook pro something who was coding in cursor with a local llm. We got talking and he said there are obviously differences but for his style of 'English coding' (he described basically what code to write/files to change but in english, but more sloppy than code obviously otherwise he would just code) it works really well. And indeed that's what he could demo. The model (which was the OSS gpt i believe) did pretty well in his nextjs project and fast too.
Thanks. I call this method Power Coding (like Power Armor), where you're still doing everything except for typing out the syntax.
I found that for this method the smaller the model, the better it works, because smaller models can generally handle it, and you benefit more from iteration speed than anything else.
I don't have hardware to run even tiny LLMs at anything approaching interactive speeds, so I use APIs. The one I ended up with was Grok 4 Fast, because it's weirdly fast.
ArtificialAnalysis has a section "end to end" time, and it was the best there for a long time, tho many other models are catching up now.