I’ve been experimenting with this today. I still don’t think AI is a very good use of my programming time… but it’s a pretty good use of my non-programming time.

I ran OpenCode with some 30B local models today and it got some useful stuff done while I was doing my budget, folding laundry, etc.

It’s less likely to “one shot” apples to apples compared to the big cloud models; Gemini 3 Pro can one shot reasonably complex coding problems through the chat interface. But through the agent interface where it can run tests, linters, etc. it does a pretty good job for the size of task I find reasonable to outsource to AI.

This is with a high end but not specifically AI-focused desktop that I mostly built with VMs, code compilation tasks, and gaming in mind some three years ago.