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Ayyaz Zafar
Ayyaz Zafar

Posted on • Originally published at ayyaztech.com

Run Claude Code with a Free Local Model — Qwen 3.5 + Ollama Setup

#tutorial #opensource #ai #webdev

Claude Code is powerful but costs money. Every prompt burns API tokens and your code is sent to external servers. What if you could run the same workflow with a free local model?

Meet Qwen 3.5

A 27B parameter model distilled from Claude 4.6 Opus reasoning traces:

  • Beats Claude Sonnet 4.5 on SWE-bench
  • 96.91% HumanEval accuracy
  • 24% less chain-of-thought bloat (faster responses)
  • Fits on a single GPU with 16GB VRAM
  • 300K+ downloads on Hugging Face

Setup 

# Install Ollama
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

# Pull the model
ollama pull qwen3.5

# Launch Claude Code with local model
claude --model ollama:qwen3.5
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One command and you're coding with local AI. Same workflow as Claude, running on your GPU.

What It Can Do

  • Write code: Clean async Python with error handling and type hints
  • Fix bugs: Reads file, finds bug, explains why, fixes in place
  • Build UIs: Full dark-theme landing page with Tailwind CSS from one prompt

All locally. No API call. No internet required.

Why This Matters

  • Free forever — no API costs, no rate limits
  • Private — your code never leaves your machine
  • Same workflow — identical Claude Code experience
  • Opus-level reasoning — distilled from Claude 4.6 Opus

Qwen 3.5 + Ollama + Claude Code = full agentic AI coding, running locally, free forever.

Originally published at ayyaztech.com

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