I kept paying a monthly subscription for a cloud coding assistant while a 16GB M4 Mac mini sat on my desk idling most of the day. So I ran the obvious experiment: can a 16GB Mac mini run a coding assistant entirely offline — no code leaving the machine, no subscription — and is it actually usable for real work?
Short answer: yes, with one hard constraint (RAM) and one soft one (context length). This article is the written version of the video above, with every command, config file, and benchmark number so you can reproduce it.
Table of contents
Why bother running locally
The hardware constraint nobody mentions
