With 32–64 GB,
here is what really runs.
Experiences reported by people using their machines every day. Not a performance promise: a concrete place to start.
in this range
Coding a SaaS product on an M1 Max, one well-scoped feature at a time
Running Qwen 3.8 27B on the same Mac they work on, this developer credits per-feature domain glossaries and tight scoping — not the model — for making local coding reliable.
Company email automation kept off the cloud for legal reasons
This company believes uploading user data to a cloud model would be illegal for their use case, so email and user-text automation runs on a Gemma 4 build on a single Radeon Pro AI R9700.
Using a local model to stress-test the agent a coding agent is building
An unusual layered setup: the local model isn't the coding agent — it's the thing an outer coding agent uses to build and stress-test a separate 'inner' agent.
A daily-refreshed RAG advisor built from your own infrastructure
A Python collector pulls read-only configs, firewall rules, and network health data every day and feeds it into a local RAG pipeline, so the advisor always knows the current state of the homelab without ever being able to touch it.
A local model and Codex reviewing each other's work, with a hard stop on disagreement
The same Qwen 3.8 27B instance that drives this person's Hermes agent also sits as an MCP tool for Codex, reviewing its proposals and its final output — and the task simply stops if the two can't agree.