Vicki Boykis: 'Running Local Models Is Good Now' Hits 1,437 Points on HN
Vicki Boykis / Hacker News·high signal
Vicki Boykis argues local models crossed a usability threshold, citing Gemma 4 (gemma-4-26b-a4b, gemma-4-12b-qat) running agentic coding at roughly 75% of frontier accuracy/speed on a 64GB M2 Mac using the Pi agent framework with sandboxed bash-only Docker execution. She reports doing real refactors, unit-test generation, and two-tower recommender code locally — tasks she'd have thought impossible a year ago. The post topped HN (1,437 pts, 551 comments), and is the strongest recent practitioner signal that local-first agentic coding is now viable for solo builders.