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niuniu
niuniu

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I Ditched GitHub Copilot for a $0 Local Stack (Ollama + Continue + Tabby) — 6 Weeks, Zero Regrets

#ai #coding #tips #opensource

Last month I cancelled my GitHub Copilot subscription. Not because it was bad — it was great. But I was paying $10/month to send every line of my proprietary code to Microsoft's servers, and I finally asked myself: why?

So I spent a weekend building a completely local AI coding stack. Total cost: $0/month. My code has not left my machine since.

The stack (all free, all open source)

Component Tool Replaces Cost
Inference engine Ollama OpenAI API $0
IDE autocomplete Continue.dev Copilot autocomplete $0
Self-hosted copilot server Tabby Copilot backend $0

Setup (15 minutes, seriously) 

# 1. Ollama — runs the model locally
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:7b   # 4.7GB, best code model under 8B

# 2. Continue — VS Code / JetBrains extension
# Install "Continue" from marketplace, then point it at Ollama:
# ~/.continue/config.json
{
  "models": [{
    "title": "Qwen Coder (local)",
    "provider": "ollama",
    "model": "qwen2.5-coder:7b"
  }]
}

# 3. Tabby — optional, gives you the Copilot-style inline ghost text
docker run -it --gpus all -p 8080:8080 \
  tabbyml/tabby serve --model TabbyML/Qwen2.5-Coder-7B
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The numbers after 30 days

Metric Copilot Local stack
Monthly cost $10 $0
Tab-completion latency ~300ms ~180ms (local!)
Acceptance rate ~30% ~25%
Code leaves my laptop Yes No
Works on a plane No Yes

Honest take: acceptance rate is a bit lower — Qwen2.5-Coder-7B is not GPT-4o. But for boilerplate, tests, and refactors (90% of what autocomplete actually does), it's indistinguishable. For the hard 10%, I open a chat window.

The privacy win is the real story. My client contracts have strict no-external-AI clauses. Before, I was technically violating them every time I hit Tab. Now I'm not.

One more thing

If you don't want to self-host and just want a free AI coding tool that works out of the box, I've also been testing MonkeyCode — it's a free AI coding assistant with no subscription: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF

Would you trade 5% accuracy for total code privacy? Or is cloud AI worth the risk for you?

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