Coding agents are becomming more and more popular (well – I guess). Yet the dependece to LLM providers is pretty obvious: Starting in June, GithubCopilot changed to usage-based billing. In April and June Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 being available, then not, then limited, … And since then I read more and more about locally hosting models.
To be honest: I was quite sceptical and surprised at the same time.
Sceptical because the larger models were always told to perform ways better and surprised to see those extremes: The outcry of Fable 5 (large frontier model) not being available – combined with “let’s self host models” (meaning a fall back to WAAYS smaller models – so why this outcry of Fable not being available …).
But then also reading articles about “Best open-weight models for coding” (09 July, 2026) … So … do we really NEED the big models? Is it just hype? And how much (V)RAM and GPU do I need?
Luckily, Birgitta Böckeler did a comparison in two articles where she’s testing different models:
- Viability of local models for coding (07 July 2026)
- Experiences with local models for coding (08 July 2026)
Overall though, the agentic coding capabilities are definitely very far away from what I’ve now become used to with bigger models.
Check out her articles. I would say they are worth reading to get an impression of what you could expect.
