Developer says local AI models have become practical for coding agents on high-memory Macs, led by GPT-OSS and Gemma 4

The author says local LLMs have moved from slow and unreliable to genuinely useful, especially for development questions and coding workflows that do not require fresh web knowledge. On a 2022 M2 Mac with 64GB RAM, they found GPT-OSS reduced the need to verify answers against API models, while Gemma 4 enabled local agentic coding at roughly 75% of frontier-model accuracy and speed.

Local inference is crossing an important usability threshold: it is no longer just a privacy or hobbyist option, but a credible tool for everyday software work. If this trend continues, AI coding may become less dependent on cloud APIs, shifting more value toward open weights, desktop tooling, and hardware with enough memory to run capable models locally.