alt Hacker NewsThere certainly is some relaxing value in working on projects to vibe code them; but not enough to pay some random corporation. Get yourself a Mac Studio or AMD395+ and pi or opencode, and a few plugins and they're pretty capable. Since they're not speed demons but reliable compaions who are always there, you don't ever feel compelled to constantly attend to whatever they're doing.
And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway. You can always get back up to speed in a month and have the LLM remind you of what it was doing.
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I find $200/month for the pro/max subscriptions cost prohibivitve, but as a software enginere $20/month is just lunch.
And with a Claude or GPT $20 Subscription, i can do other fun things too like using it for real things (emails) or image generation.
A Mac Studio or AMD395 is neither of it. And its not just a basic setup either. I need to buy it, configure it, put it somewhere. That alone is a grand and more + a whole weekend.
Buying hardware is paying a "random corporation". Make the massive hardware purchase after finding out if you have enough demand to buy rather than rent,
Yeah. I setup opencode + qwen 3.6 last weekend.
It's actually really cool to have it work on some internal tooling and stuff while I work on my primary projects.
I'm surprised how easy it is to setup and that it can handle modestly complex planning and development flows.
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> And when you inevitably get bored with it, well, you've not done much anyway.
I'm very interested in Local LLMs but the cheapest Mac Studio right now is more expensive than 8 years of a Claude Code Pro subscription, and incomparably slower/less capable. If I get bored with it, I will have a piece of unused hardware and a couple grand less in my bank account.