We run coding assistance models on MacBook Pros locally, so here is my experience: On hardware side I recommend Apple M1 / M2 / M3 with at least 400Gb/s memory bandwidth. For local coding assistance this is perfect for 7B or 33B models.

We also run a Mac Studio with a bigger model (70b), M2 ultra and 192GB ram, as a chat server. It's pretty fast. Here we use Open WebUI as interface.

Software wise Ollama is OK as most IDE plugins can work with it now. I personally don't like the go code they have. Also some key features are missing from it that I would need and those are just never getting done, even as multiple people submitted PRs for some.

LM Studio is better overall, both as server or as chat interface.

I can also recommend CodeGPT plugin for JetBrains products and Continue plugin for VSCode.

As a chat server UI as I mentioned Open WebUI works great, I use it with together ai too as backend.