I don't know about good, I use a lot of local models and they're still pretty painful to run locally

You have dense models (qwen 27b, gemma 31b) who are pretty smart, but pretty slow

You have MoE models (gemma 26b, qwen 35b, north mini code 30b) who are pretty fast, but make a lot of mistakes

You need a lot of memory to run these well, quantization makes tool calling weaker, so most run at 4 bit quants and are wondering why it kinda sucks and that's because you've essentially lobotomized the model (I recommend unsloth quants, i recommend 6bit for MoEs and 5bit for dense)

So you need a lot of compute to make the pre-fill fast, you need bandwidth to make the decode fast, you need a lot of memory to hold everything - lot of ifs

On top of that, your laptop becomes a loud hot churning machine, it's uncomfortable to work with.

So are they good? not really. Do they work? yes

edit: just wanna clarify - i think open models are the future, i think they're super important, i'm contributing constantly to the ecosystem - i think people should play around with these models, i think people should use `pi` and learn how it all works - but don't download a model expecting it to be good out of the box, you will have to tune and configure a lot of stuff to replace a "coding agent" that most people are using models for