A maker weighs replacing Claude Code with a private local AI setup
The poster mainly uses Claude and Claude Code but wants to move to a fully private local setup. They use AI for personal organization, coding help, boilerplate, small refactoring, and quickly understanding code during hackathons or competitions. They describe a plan to access a home desktop from a Surface Pro 9 using Tailscale, Ollama, and Opencode. They say a similar test with the Gemma 4B model ran okay with little latency.
Key points
- The poster currently uses Claude and Claude Code for organization and coding help.
- They want a fully private local setup because AI lab policies keep changing.
- Their home desktop has 32GB of RAM and a 3070 graphics card.
- They are considering Tailscale for remote access and Ollama plus Opencode for running models.
- They tested Gemma 4B in a similar setup and said it had little latency.
Quick term guide
- local setup
- A way to run AI on your own computer or home machine instead of a cloud service.
- boilerplate
- Repetitive, standard code that gets reused across projects with little change — often the first task given to junior developers.
- refactoring
- The process of reorganizing and cleaning up the internal code of a program without changing what it actually does on the outside.
- hackathon
- A short, intensive event where developers team up to build something from scratch in a day or weekend
- Tailscale
- A tool that lets you securely access your home devices over the internet, as if they were on the same local network
- Solo makers
- People who build and launch their own products or services entirely on their own.
- graphics card
- A component inside a computer that handles displaying images and running game visuals.
- remote access
- Connecting to and controlling a computer from another place.