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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 up

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.

someuser54541 6mo ago
Please report back, would be very interested in your findings.
- sshine 6mo ago
  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
  - taikon 6mo ago
    To be clear, was OpenCode a better in your opinion compared to ClaudeCode?
    - sshine 5mo ago
      Better UI, worse model (GLM), probably slightly worse agentic runtime. In spite of how glitchy Claude feels, it makes decisions fast.
  - TacticalCoder 6mo ago
    > 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.
- robertkarl 6mo ago
  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 https://github.com/robertkarl/local-qwen-first-10-minutes it includes some token generation numbers and steps to repro.
operatingthetan 6mo ago
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.
- jorjon 6mo ago
  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.
  - sincerely 5mo ago
    Just like me :)
hank2000 6mo ago
how was it? I'm doing this today
- robertkarl 6mo ago
  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 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.

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.

someuser54541 6mo ago

Please report back, would be very interested in your findings.

sshine 6mo ago
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
- taikon 6mo ago
  To be clear, was OpenCode a better in your opinion compared to ClaudeCode?
  - sshine 5mo ago
    Better UI, worse model (GLM), probably slightly worse agentic runtime. In spite of how glitchy Claude feels, it makes decisions fast.
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago
  > 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.
robertkarl 6mo ago
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 https://github.com/robertkarl/local-qwen-first-10-minutes it includes some token generation numbers and steps to repro.

operatingthetan 6mo ago

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.

jorjon 6mo ago
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.
- sincerely 5mo ago
  Just like me :)

hank2000 6mo ago

how was it? I'm doing this today

robertkarl 6mo ago
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 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.