Last time, I closed with a line I half-meant as a joke: "a 3-way orchestration between ChatGPT, Claude, and my local LLM, to maintain my vibe coding momentum even when I hit token usage limits." One of you commented that you couldn't wait for your Claude Code session to refresh at 9:50am. Same feeling, different weekend. So this time I actually built the thing.
The question that started it
I'm running Qwen 2.5-Coder 32B locally via Ollama on an M1 Max, 64GB unified memory — fixed hardware, not upgrading it any time soon. The question was blunt: can this local setup actually stand in for Claude Code when I hit a wall, or am I fooling myself?
Short answer: not as-is, but closer than I expected. Qwen2.5-Coder 32B benchmarks around GPT-4o territory — fine for autocomplete, weak on the multi-step, tool-calling agentic work Claude Code does well. The real fix wasn't a bigger local model alone, it was pairing a better local model with a proper agent harness instead of raw Ollama chat.
What changed on the local side
