Local coding model picks for repository work, debugging, agents and private software engineering with LM Studio or a local runtime.
For coding, prioritize coding score, reasoning score and runtime fit. A slightly smaller model that stays responsive is usually better than a larger model that starves memory.
Moonshot AI trillion-parameter MoE flagship. 32B active params per token with 384 experts. Matches or beats GPT-4 Turbo on MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval. Agentic & tool-use specialist. Server-grade only. Modified MIT.
MiniMax native multimodal MoE with 1M context and MiniMax Sparse Attention. Around 428B parameters with 23B active. Built for long-context coding, cowork and agentic workflows, with local deployment via SGLang, vLLM or Transformers. Server-grade only.
Moonshot AI coding-focused agentic Kimi built on K2.6. 1T MoE with 32B active parameters, 256K context, MoonViT vision encoder and stronger long-horizon coding while reducing thinking-token usage by roughly 30% vs K2.6. Modified MIT. Server-grade only.
Flagship open-source Qwen 3.5. Only 17B active params despite 397B total — world-class quality at MoE efficiency. Matches GPT-4o on major benchmarks. Requires multi-GPU or server-grade hardware. Apache 2.0.
Moonshot AI K2 with extended reasoning mode. Chain-of-thought traces before final answer. Top-5 on GPQA, AIME, SWE-bench. Requires datacenter-grade hardware or distributed inference. Modified MIT.
DeepSeek frontier MoE with 1M-token context, hybrid compressed attention and top-tier coding/reasoning. MIT licensed. Datacenter-grade only.
Z.ai next-generation flagship for agentic engineering. Stronger coding, long-horizon tool use, SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench and repo generation. MIT licensed.
Z.ai flagship open model for long-horizon coding, reasoning and agentic work. 744B total, 40B active, 1M-token context, MIT license. Unsloth Dynamic GGUF makes it technically local, but it needs workstation/server-class memory: ~245GB total memory for 2-bit and 372GB+ for 4-bit.
Experimental V3.2 with DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) — halves inference cost vs V3.1 on long context while keeping quality. 128K context, improved coding & tool-use. MIT licensed. Server-grade.
These guides use LocalClaw's internal model database for scoring, then avoid hard claims beyond public hardware and model availability signals checked before publishing.