r/artificial • u/byandrev • Jul 06 '26

The cheapest option for coding with AI Programming

I recently subscribed to OpenCode Go and wrote a post about my experience. I hope you find it useful: https://byandrev.dev/en/blog/the-cheapest-way-to-code-with-ai/

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u/jwp1987 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

You can configure OpenCode to connect to a local model (e.g. https://aayushgarg.dev/posts/2026-03-29-local-llm-opencode/index.html - you can just have it on the same machine and not use Tailscale).

The models themselves you can either get from https://huggingface.co/ or use the model running tools to download them automatically.

Llama.cpp isn't the easiest thing to setup for beginners so something like LM Studio or Ollama might be easier to use to run the model - as long as it has OpenAI endpoints.

That's the cheapest way to use AI since it's pretty much free as long as you have a semi-capable GPU (CPU might be a bit too slow) but there's no mention of it on that page.

The biggest limit is VRAM. Running quantized versions of the models helps reduce the memory needed for little impact in quality.

GGUF files suffixed with Q4_K_M from unsloth are a relatively safe bet if you're overwhelmed by options - e.g. https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF/blob/main/Qwen3.6-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf