I can use Gemini 3 Flash with the harness I built for around 8 years and still not exceed the cost of a Mac Studio with 128GB, the price for privacy is very high. Agentic flows that get stuck can be worked around but I prefer developer velocity.
Not sure if you intended this to be this philosophical, but this is basically the slogan for modern life now.
Not everyone can plough $$$$ into hardware right now (more power to those who can), so choosing to rent is an A-Ok strategy.
You can. You just don't want to. Huge difference.
You may be, but the topic of discussion is whether anyone is using a local model as their main coding tool.
For corporate use, if the corporation would break the law sending anything to the open internet or to the US, then you can't use any model that's not hosted in house. And there are many such cases.
And sounds like you haven't factored in the cost of electricity to run that Mac Studio as an LLM machine. Probably get a few more years.