alt Hacker NewsTo answer the last question: What kind of programming do you do? You are not going to be able to run a model competitive with the SOTA yet; use the cloud. Since you have the budget I'd suggest getting a $20 subscription of each (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) so you can lean on their respective strengths.
I got a free month of the Premium tier with Google[1], YMMV. Been pleasantly surprised about Gemini 3 Pro. Got ChatGPT Business at work to compare it to.
That said, Google's VSCode integration was terrible, kept logging me out and just didn't work well.
[1]: https://one.google.com/about/plans