Best Local LLM for Coding in 2026

Written by Jakub Rusinowski · Last updated July 21, 2026

Running a local coding assistant saves you $10-20/month on Copilot or Cursor and keeps your proprietary code off third-party servers.

In This Guide

• The Short Answer (mid-2026)
• Going Further

Running a local coding assistant saves you $10-20/month on Copilot or Cursor and keeps your proprietary code off third-party servers.

This comparison now lives in the Coding Agents Hub, where every hardware figure is computed by the same engine as our GPU checker and updated as models ship: Best Local Coding LLMs by VRAM Tier.

The Short Answer (mid-2026)

• 8 GB VRAM → Qwen3-Coder 8B (ollama pull qwen3-coder:8b) — current-gen, FIM-tuned, ~6 GB at Q4.
• 16 GB VRAM → Devstral-2 22B (ollama pull devstral:22b) — the best dedicated coding agent under 24 GB.
• 24 GB VRAM → Qwen 3.6 27B (ollama pull qwen3.6:27b) or Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B — the sweet spot for local agentic coding.
• Workstation / 96 GB+ Mac → Qwen3-Coder 80B-A3B — ~96% of the open flagship's quality, self-hostable.

Going Further

• Best local coding models, full rankings — every tier, with licenses and exact VRAM.
• Run a local coding agent end-to-end — Ollama + Continue/Cline in VS Code.
• VRAM requirements for coding LLMs — why agent contexts need extra headroom.

→ Check your GPU compatibility | → The full Coding Agents Hub

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