What's your local AI coding setup on a MacBook Pro M4?

I've spent the last couple of days trying different setups (Ollama, Continue, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, OpenRouter...) and at this point I feel like I've spent more time configuring tools than actually writing code. I'm on a MacBook Pro M4 with 32GB RAM and I'd really like to keep things local if possible. Right now I have these models downloaded: Gemma 4 Qwen 3.5 9B Qwen3-Coder 30B I'm not looking for benchmark numbers or "this model scores 2% higher" type of answers. I just want a setup that's actually pleasant to use every day. If you're developing locally on Apple Silicon, what's your workflow? Are you using Ollama, MLX, LM Studio, llama.cpp, or something else? What are you using as the frontend? Continue, Aider, Goose, Zed, VS Code, etc.? Which model do you end up using the most? Have you managed to replace Cursor/Claude Code/Copilot with a local setup? I'm mostly doing Python, FastAPI, React, and TypeScript, so I'd love to hear from people using local LLMs for real development rather than just chatting with them. Curious to know what's actually working well for people these days. submitted by /u/FroyoEducational4851 [link] [comments]

Source: r/ollama | 2026-07-31