I use Qwen 3 Coder Next daily on my mac as my main coding agent. It is incredibly capable and its strange how you are painting this picture as if its a fringe use case, there are whole communities that have popped up around running local models.

The thing I'm most excited about is the moment that I run a model on my 64GB M2 that can usefully drive a coding agent harness.

Maybe Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is that model? This comment reports good results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249343#47249782

I need to put that through its paces.

I managed to get qwen2.5-coder:14B working under ollama on an Nvidia 2080 Ti with 11GB of VRAM, using ollama cli, outputting what looks like 200 words-per-minute to my eye

It has been useful for education ("What does this Elixir code do? <Paste file> ..... <general explanation> "then What this line mean?")

as well as getting a few basic tests written when I'm unfamiliar with the syntax. ("In Elixir Phoenix, given <subject under test, paste entire module file> and <test helper module, paste entire file> and <existing tests, pasted in, used both for context and as examples> , what is one additional test you would write?")

This is useful in that I get a single test I can review, run, paste in, and I'm not using any quota. Generally I have to fix it, but that's just a matter of reading the actual test and throwing the test failure output to the LLM to propose a fix. Some human judgement is required but once I got going adding a test took 10 minutes despite being relatively unfamiliar with Elixir Phoenix .

It's a nice loop, I'm in the loop, and I'm learning Elixir and contributing a useful feature that has tests.

I think this is directing coders towards self-sufficiency and that's a good thing. If they don't end up using it for agentic coding, they can use it for running tests, builds, non-agentic voice controlled coding, video creation, running kubernetes, or agent orchestration. So no, it's not evil, even if it doesn't go quite as expected.