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How to Run a Local AI Coding Assistant on a 16GB Mac Mini Using Ollama

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A developer replaced their paid GitHub Copilot subscription with a fully offline coding assistant running on an Apple M4 Mac Mini with 16GB of unified memory. The setup uses Ollama to serve open-source Qwen 2.5 Coder models locally, with the 7B parameter variant identified as the sweet spot for the available RAM. Because macOS and a typical developer environment consume 6–8GB before any model loads, only 7–9GB of headroom remains, making model selection critical. The local setup offers key advantages including privacy, no ongoing subscription cost, and full offline functionality, though it trails cloud-hosted frontier models on complex multi-file reasoning tasks. The author provides step-by-step instructions covering installation, model selection, VS Code integration, and performance tuning for 16GB machines.

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How to Run a Local AI Coding Assistant on a 16GB Mac Mini Using Ollama · ShortSingh