But cloud is what will enslave them to the corporation's will.

Google (of all companies!) demonstrated you can get useful stuff with reasonable performance with model running local on their smartphones.

Depending on your expecations you can get the local models running on a recent enough laptop, you just need 16GB of ram to be comfortable. It certainly exceeded my expectations (but i don't use the LLM to write code, only to do the real boring stuff: docs.)

As one of those folks with a 6000 Pro who tries out basically every local model I can get my hands on; local models still aren't ready to be relied on for larger-scale software engineering. They're quite capable when it comes to writing and editing code though.