18gb RAM it is a bit tight

with 32gb RAM:

qwen3-coder and glm 4.7 flash are both impressive 30b parameter models

not on the level of gpt 5.2 codex but small enough to run locally (w/ 32gb RAM 4bit quantized) and quite capable

but it is just a matter of time I think until we get quite capable coding models that will be able to run with less RAM