← Back to context

Comment by keerthiko

10 hours ago

Claude Code is fairly notoriously token inefficient as far as coding agent/harnesses go (i come from aider pre-CC). It's only viable because the Max subscriptions give you approximately unlimited token budget, which resets in a few hours even if you hit the limit. But this also only works because cloud models have massive token windows (1M tokens on opus right now) which is a bit difficult to make happen locally with the VRAM needed.

And if you somehow managed to open up a big enough VRAM playground, the open weights models are not quite as good at wrangling such large context windows (even opus is hardly capable) without basically getting confused about what they were doing before they finish parsing it.

7 comments

keerthiko

Reply
unsnap_biceps  10 hours ago

I use CC at work, so I haven't explored other options. Is there a better one to use locally? I presumed they were all going to be pretty similar.

  • jaggederest  9 hours ago

    If you want to experiment with same-harness-different-models Opencode is classically the one to use. After their recent kerfluffle with Anthropic you'll have to use API pricing for opus/sonnet/haiku which makes it kind of a non-starter, but it lets you swap out any number of cloud or local models using e.g. ollama or z.ai or whatever backend provider you like.

    I'd rate their coding agent harness as slightly to significantly less capable than claude code, but it also plays better with alternate models.

    • blitzar  8 hours ago

      I am hopeful the leaked claude code narrows the capability, perhaps even googles offering will be viable once they borrow some ideas from claude.