I ditched Claude Code's $20 plan for a local LLM in VS Code, and I'm getting more done
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A developer shares their experience replacing Claude Code's $20/month subscription with a local LLM setup inside VS Code. After testing several models on an M5 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM, they settled on Qwen2.5 Coder 14B as the best balance of capability and memory usage. The setup uses Docker Model Runner as the inference backend and the Continue VS Code extension as the interface, connected via an OpenAI-compatible API on localhost. While the local model can't match Claude's autonomy on large projects, it handles routine tasks like bug fixes and small feature additions well — and eliminates usage limit anxiety entirely.
Table of contents
Selecting the right modelBuilding the local LLM layer in VS CodeThe actual experience is better than I thought115 Impressions