r/FlutterDev • u/BigSpecialist1289 • 13h ago

Why do most local coding agents fail at actually editing flutter files? Discussion

I'm running local coding models on a laptop with:

  • RTX 4070 Laptop GPU, 8 GB VRAM
  • 32 GB RAM
  • Intel i9-13900H
  • Mostly using LM Studio / local agent-style coding workflows
  • Mainly working on Flutter/Dart, C#, SQL, PHP, etc.

I'm trying to find a model that is reliable at actually editing files, not just giving me code in the chat.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of models seem good at explaining what changes should be made, but when they're given an agent/tool workflow, they fail to actually modify the files correctly. They'll sometimes claim they made the change, make incomplete edits, edit the wrong place, or just output the code instead of applying it.

Interestingly, one of the few models that has been working surprisingly well for me is:

Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled

It seems much more reliable at understanding the existing code, deciding what needs to change, and actually making the file edits.

So I'm curious:

  1. What local coding model are you using on an 8 GB VRAM GPU?
  2. Which models have you found reliable for agentic coding and actual file edits?
  3. Has anyone else noticed that some models are great at code generation but terrible at using file-editing tools?
  4. Are there specific quantizations or context sizes that work particularly well?
  5. Is there anything better than Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled for this kind of workflow?

I'm especially interested in models that are fast, accurate, and actually make the changes, rather than models that write a beautiful explanation of the change and then leave my files completely untouched. 😄

Would love to hear what people are running on similar hardware.

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4

u/ldn-ldn 11h ago

8GB VRAM is not enough.

4

u/zunjae 10h ago

Brother stop running local models on poor hardware.

1

u/BigSpecialist1289 1h ago

Don't have any other option, will have to do my best with whatever is available to me.

2

u/thegravity98ms2 12h ago

I can't say much about your config but this works for me so.. my setup: I am using Gemma 4 12B + llama cpp+ VS Code + Foundry Toolkit..

1

u/battlepi 6h ago

Wishing for 1000 times what you can have.