There's a lot of great work both around supporting memory efficient inference (like on a closer-to-consumer machine), as well as on open source code-focused models.

A lot of people are excited about the Qwen3-Coder family of models: https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-coder-687fc861...

For running locally, there are tools like Ollama and LM Studio. Your hardware needs will fluctuate depending on what size/quantization of model you try to run, but 2k in hardware cost is reasonable for running a lot of models. Some people have good experiences using the M-series Macs, which is probably a good bang-for-buck if you're exclusively interested in inference.

I'd recommend checking out the LocalLlamas subreddit for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

Getting results on par with big labs isn't feasible, but if you prefer to run everything locally, it is a fun and doable project.