I used to think local AI was mostly useful for demos and small experiments.
Then I spent a few days testing Gemma 4 on my laptop.
The interesting part wasn’t benchmark numbers. It was how usable the model actually felt during normal development work.
I tested it with:
Rails services
old migrations
background jobs
messy business logic
and it handled repository context better than I expected from a local model.
It still struggles with bigger architectural decisions and long autonomous tasks, but debugging and code understanding were surprisingly solid.
The biggest takeaway for me:
local models are finally becoming practical enough that I’d actually keep one running during daily work.
Top comments (1)
it's cool to hear how gemma 4 made local models feel more practical for daily development tasks. having something that can handle messy business logic is a game changer. on a related note, moonshift lets you deploy a full next.js + postgres + auth app in about 7 minutes, and you own the code. if you're curious, I can set you up for a free run to try it out.