Comment by robertkarl
20 hours ago
This was literally my task today, to try out Qwen 9B locally on my, albeit a bit memory-constrained at 18GB, macbook with pi or opencode. Before reading this update.
20 hours ago
This was literally my task today, to try out Qwen 9B locally on my, albeit a bit memory-constrained at 18GB, macbook with pi or opencode. Before reading this update.
Minimax coding plan is $10 a month for roughly 3x the $20 Claude Pro CLI usage allowed. That would be good place to start. 200k context though.
MiniMax has its own issues. Server overloads, API errors, and failure to adhere to even the system prompt. It can happily work for hours and get no job done.
Just like me :)
Please report back, would be very interested in your findings.
I ran OpenCode + GLM-5.1 for three weeks during my vacation. It’s okay. It thinks a lot more to get to a similar result as Claude. So it’s slower. It’s congested during peak hours. It has quirks as the context gets close to full.
But if you’re stuck with no better model, it’s better than local models and no models.
I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. I’m playing around with TUI widgets trying to recreate and improve that experience
To be clear, was OpenCode a better in your opinion compared to ClaudeCode?
> I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed.
Claude's TUI is not a TUI. It's the most WTF thing ever: the TUI is actually a GUI. A headless browser shipped the TUI that, in real-time, renders the entire screen, scrolls to the bottom, and converts that to text mode. There are several serious issues and I'll mention two that do utterly piss me off...
1. Insane "jumping" around where the text "scrolls back" then scrolls back down to your prompt: at this point, seen the crazy hack that TUI is, if you tell me the text jumping around in the TUI is because they're simulating mouse clicks on the scrollbar I would't be surprised. If I'm not mistaken we've seen people "fixing" this by patching other programs (tmux ?).
2. What you see in the TUI is not the output of the model. That is, to me, the most insane of it all. They're literally changing characters between their headlessly rendered GUI and the TUI.
> Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed.
"grown" or "hacked" are way too nice words for the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
Codex is described as a: "Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". It's 95%+ Rust code. I wonder if the "lightweight" is a stab at the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
For what it's worth: here's my experience in the first 10 minutes of using Qwen locally to write some code. https://github.com/robertkarl/local-qwen-first-10-minutes it includes some token generation numbers and steps to repro.
how was it? I'm doing this today
I will report back... but I have to recommend this comment on a post about Qwen 3.6 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47843466 by daemonologist
it goes into detail about llama-server args; quants to try; and layer/kv cache splits. I plan to try the techniques there.