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The Local AI Coding Setup Everyone Asked For
My laptop specs, Ollama setup, Qwen model, VS Code workflow, and what actually runs well locally
After I published my article about replacing Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot with a local AI coding agent for 7 days, the article got a much stronger response than I expected.
A lot of people understood the main point immediately. Local AI is not only about speed. It is about privacy, control, cost, offline access, and having another option when you do not want every piece of code going to the cloud.
But there was also one fair criticism.
Several readers asked the same question in different ways:
What hardware did you use?
Which model did you run?
Was this on a normal laptop or some expensive workstation?
How much RAM, VRAM, CPU, and SSD do we actually need?
And honestly, they were right to ask. Without hardware details, any local AI article feels incomplete. Local AI depends heavily on the machine you are using. A 3B model on a normal laptop and a 70B model on a workstation are not the same thing. Both may be called “local LLMs,” but the real-world experience is completely different.
