I’m doing a lot of coding and what I would ideally like to have is a long context model (128k tokens) that I can use to throw in my whole codebase.

I’ve been experimenting e.g. with Claude and what usually works well is to attach e.g. the whole architecture of a CRUD app along with the most recent docs of the framework I’m using and it’s okay for menial tasks. But I am very uncomfortable sending any kind of data to these providers.

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of space so I can’t build a proper desktop. My options are either renting out a VPS or going for something small like a MacStudio. I know speeds aren’t great, but I was wondering if using e.g. RAG for documentation could help me get decent speeds.

I’ve read that especially on larger contexts Macs become very slow. I’m not very convinced but I could get a new one probably at 50% off as a business expense, so the Apple tax isn’t as much an issue as the concern about speed.

Any ideas? Are there other mini pcs available that could have better architecture? Tried researching but couldn’t find a lot

Edit: I found some stats on GitHub on different models: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/10444

Based on that I also conclude that you’re gonna wait forever if you work with a large codebase.

  • @KoalaUnknown
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    8 hours ago

    There are some videos on youtube of people running local LLMs on the newer M4 chips which have pretty good AI performance. Obviously, a 5090 is going to destroy it in raw compute power, but the large unified memory on Apple Silicon is nice.

    That being said, there are plenty of small ITX cases at about 13-15L that can fit a large nvidia GPU.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      5 hours ago

      Thanks! Hadn’t thought of YouTube at all but it’s super helpful. I guess that’ll help me decide if the extra Ram is worth it considering that inference will be much slower if I don’t go NVIDIA.