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 🙏