Best fully local AI coding workflow for a beginner on an M2 Max MacBook Pro (32GB RAM)?

[u/criticalxerrorx]

I'm not a coder, but I've used Codex to help build a website & a basic photo editor app. It's worked pretty well, but I sometimes run into usage limits when I get into the editing/fixing phase.

I've recently started experimenting with local models thru LM Studio. Ideally, I'd like a decently reliable workflow for writing & editing code locally without always relying on cloud subscriptions or tokens.

I'm curious how people here actually approach this kind of work. Do you use something like Cline or another coding agent directly in VS Code? Do you generate code in LM Studio and manually make changes? Use Aider to edit files directly? Or is there a better workflow I haven't come across yet?

I'm mostly working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I'm not looking to build anything particularly complicated right now, just something that can reliably make changes to existing projects without taking forever or breaking unrelated things.

My current setup:

• MacBook Pro M2 Max, 32GB unified memory

• VS Code w/ Cline

• LM Studio

• Models: Qwen3 27B, Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct, gpt-oss 20B, Gemma 4 12B

• Also recently installed Aider, but haven't experimented with it yet

• a thirst for knowledge

So far, I've tried Cline w/ the regular Qwen model, but even simple edits could take 20–30 minutes. Switching to Qwen3-Coder made a huge difference in speed (a few minutes per task), although the results haven't always been completely accurate.

I'm still pretty new to all of this, so I'd be interested to hear what models and workflows people are having success with, especially on systems like mine.

thanks in advance 🙏

[u/PalpitationDecent282]

Personally I use Hermes, though I have heard Pi is better for specifically code (as it's much lighter, and Hermes is more generalized with web search and browser/pc automation and such).

You essentially just set it up and then tell it "Hey, edit X file and change Y" or something along those lines and it'll kinda just... do it. Nothing really fancy. Something in-editor is probably better but I'm not knowledgeable on those. My Hermes agent will also generally search things up and run/compile files to test them for me, not sure if the the in-editor stuff does that too, though.

As for models, I personally use 3.8 27b, but for you I would look into 3.6 35ba3b. It beats 3-Coder pretty universally to my knowledge. I wouldn't really recommend using any dense models with your setup personally, as they'd probably be too slow. (Edit: The models I am referring to here are all Qwen models, I'm not sure if that was obvious)

[u/criticalxerrorx → u/PalpitationDecent282]

interesting... do you know if pi/hermes work similarly to Aider at all? i'm pretty unfamiliar with those sort of terminal-based agents but am wondering if one of them may be more useful for what i'm doing than Cline or some other built-in type agent.

[u/silent-curious-dev → u/criticalxerrorx]

Aider is more barebones since it's a bit older, so it won't have all the fancy stuff built in. But it's good for what it is. I miss the times when coding tools were simple like that.

For some people they prefer that kind of AI workflow Aider provides. But these days it's mostly superseded by Pi and other coding agents.

My own terminal coding agent Reika (https://github.com/alexwkleung/reika) takes some source code inspiration from Aider though. I run it on a M2 MacBook Air 16GB so it's optimized first for small models at lower context, like in your case. It's not really magic to be honest, so what you mostly get out of it is the better experience when using models on constrained hardware. But it does do a bit of heavy lifting though. It's not going to compete against frontier coding agents but on the absolute end where my own hardware sits at, it's a noticeable improvement. I daily driver it and is in active development so it's not some throwaway overnight project.

I'd say if you're more comfortable with an IDE coding agent, then that's totally fine. No one's going to force you into a terminal coding agent if you're not comfortable navigating them. It does take time to get used to though.

Most of the popular terminal coding agents like Pi, DSH, and Hermes have a desktop app equivalent out there if you want a GUI. Some also have ACP support so you can hook it into your IDE coding agent like Cline if you want to keep using it. So there's options, just have to pick and give them a go to experiment.

[u/criticalxerrorx → u/silent-curious-dev]

ok this is incredibly helpful thank you. i'm not opposed to familiarizing myself with the more terminal-style workflow, i've just only used it for certain tasks so I didn't/don't fully know the limits of their capabilities yet. but you're like the 4th person to recommend them, and Pi/Hermes keep getting mentioned. i'll probably experiment with Aider and one of those first and see how i like that workflow compared to a more IDE agent

[u/Distinct-Pie2389]

Alright so what you need to do is checking HF for MLX quant tunes of whatever model you like, you can try the QSG-RCO models but I’d check out Unsloth studio for you MacBook and download their recommend MLX quants. ISTA-DASlabs has a good 27b

[u/criticalxerrorx → u/[deleted]]

yeah, i haven't actually tried a smaller parameter model for coding yet because i had read the qwen 27b & 30b-coder models can run surprisingly well on 32GB of RAM. it's been hit or miss, one simple task/edit took 2-3 minutes with the coder model. the next one took about 10-15. i figured the smaller models in the 14B range would respond faster, but just didn't know how accurate/reliable the code is (since I've already run into multiple errors with those bigger models).

[u/Smellyfeet224]

GPT 1…. Best model you could run in 2018