Running local models is good now

Local AI models running on personal computers have gotten dramatically better in just the past six months. Google's Gemma 4 family, particularly the 26B and 12B versions, now handles real coding tasks like refactoring Python scripts, writing unit tests, and running agentic workflows at roughly 75% the accuracy of top cloud-based models. While slow inference and small context windows remain drawbacks, the gap between local and frontier models is closing fast.