C is actually one of the better supported languages for AI assistants these days, a lot better than it was a year or two ago. The hallucination of APIs problem has improved alot. Models like Claude Sonnet and Qwen 2.5 Coder have much stronger recall of POSIX/stdlib now. The harder remaining challenge with C is that AI still struggles with ownership and lifetime reasoning at scale. It can write correct isolated functions but doesnt always carry the right invariants across a larger codebase, which is exactly the architecture problem the article describes.

For local/offline Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B is probably your strongest option if you have the VRAM (or can run it quantized). Handles C better than most other local models in my experience.