While cloud models are of course faster and smarter, I've been pretty happy running Qwen 3 Coder 30B-A3B on my M4 Max MacBook Pro. It has been a pretty good coding assistant for me with Aider, and it's also great for throwing code at and asking questions. For coding specifically, it feels roughly on par with SOTA models from mid-late 2024.

At small contexts with llama.cpp on my M4 Max, I get 90+ tokens/sec generation and 800+ tokens/sec prompt processing. Even at large contexts like 50k tokens, I still get fairly usable speeds (22 tok/s generation).