You're paying $10 to $20 a month for Copilot. You don't have to. A 2024-era laptop can run a coding model good enough for autocomplete, refactors, and "explain this function" entirely offline. No API key, no telemetry, no per-token bill. Here's the exact 2026 setup I run on a 16GB machine.
Why local in 2026
Two years ago, local coding models were a toy. The autocomplete was slow and the suggestions were noise. That changed. qwen2.5-coder and deepseek-coder-v2 are genuinely useful now, and the tooling caught up: Ollama serves them, Continue.dev wires them into your editor, and the whole thing runs on hardware you already own.
The pitch is simple:
Free. No subscription, no usage caps.
