Local vs. Cloud AI Coding Agents: Benchmark Results, Hardware Costs, and Performance
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This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/can-local-llms-replace-opus-and-codex-i-tested-a-macbook-an-rtx-5080-a-spark-and-chinese-models.
Opus, Codex, GLM, DeepSeek and local Qwen and Gemma on a MacBook M5, an RTX 5080 laptop and a DGX Spark, on one agentic coding task with traps.
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I ran one trap-filled coding task through Opus, Codex, cheap Chinese models on OpenRouter, and local models on a MacBook M5, an RTX 5080 laptop and a DGX Spark. Small local MoEs fix the obvious and miss everything subtle; a dense 27B on the Spark matches Opus but takes 16 minutes. The cheapest good result came from DeepSeek for 1.3 cents.
