Ask HN: What computer are you using for AI coding tools?

1 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by willsmith72

Item id: 48498766

5 Comments

inventor7777

12 hours ago

5-10 sessions?! Wow, not sure how you keep track of those.

For all my daily use + Codex Desktop and some local AIs in Ollama/LM Studio (which power my Home Assistant Voice Assistants) I have an Mac Studio M4 Max with 48GB of RAM (Which I bought early last year IIRC)

It's a complete beast and runs GPT-OSS 20B at over 100 tok/sec. The GUI never slows down, and I run Sequoia still, so it is always smooth and polished. I've also never heard the fans.

I got mine for $2250 USD because I am eligible for the student discount. I got the base 512GB SSD because I store most stuff on external SSDs/HDDs anyway.

willsmith72

11 hours ago

Nice thanks for the info. 48gb ram would be a dream

Yeah I go back and forth using more or less sessions. Was always a fan of kanban, less WIP better, but some sessions are just slow so I end up starting new ones.

inventor7777

11 hours ago

Sure! I know the M3 series are still super fast chips, so I wonder what is slowing down...your CPU itself, RAM getting full, OS bloat...? Seems wild to me that processes that run in the cloud would take so many resources.

dlcarrier

7 hours ago

I have an Intel A770, because at $200 USD it was the second cheapest way to get 16 of dedicated VRAM. (The cheapest is a $100 Radeon Instinct Mi25, but it's a bit old and slow.)

I battled with Python packages a lot to get a1111 working, gave up when it broke on an update and switched to ComfyUI which has worked great. I can't get Llama.cpp to use the GPU, but I'm currently installing some of Intel's proprietary OpenVino tools in hopes of getting an LLM going, and the performance through their tools is really good.