Qwen 3.6 27B is quite good for agentic coding, and practical to run on consumer hardware. You need a system with either 32+ GB VRAM, or a unified memory system with 48+ GB VRAM and a decent integrated GPU. While not cheap, such a setup is still attainable for much of the world, and will eventually get cheaper over time. Open models hosted on non-American clouds also remain an option with a much lower barrier to entry, for cases where privacy is less critical.

Open weights/source doesn't necessarily mean running on local hardware, though.

I imagine having multiple providers competing will drive down hosted versions of open weight models drastically.

Before the AI "crisis" it used to take about $3500 to get a prebuilt with a 5090 which can run good enough LLMs. I run reasonable LLMs on just 16GB of VRAM on my Mac, and the 5090 has double that.

Moore's law or one of its generalizations still holds, so it will only be a short matter of time before a $1k computer will be able to train and run a powerful enough model.

About $2k in 2026 dollars and falling.

> Historically a good Windows computer cost $1000 and it was all it took to start programming.

Gotta remember inflation here.

$1K in 1995 was roughly equivalent to $2K now and wouldn't have been a particularly "good" machine then.

In 1982 the Commodore 64 started at about $600 bucks, also roughly around $2K today.

If you outgrew that, beefier machines back then were A LOT. It was easy to find $2k+ towers and (especially) laptops even into the 2000s, and a lot of those would be $5K+ equivalent today.

I don't understand the justification for local hardware with cost as the motivation. The same (or bigger/better) open weights models can served by third parties at much higher resource utilisation, and will therefore be much cheaper!?

Especially because the world is likely to persist, at least for a while, in state where computing hardware demand drastically exceeds supply resulting in high prices for hardware. So why wouldn't you want to max out utilisation and amortize costs, at least for typical (non sensitive) use cases.

Yes, between Moore's Law and more efficient model architectures, we just have to let time do its work.

> Historically a good Windows computer cost $1000 and it was all it took to start programming

Started with computers around 2009 and later bought an oldish computer (a pentium 4 PC) for the equivalent of 50 usd. Codeblocks and Python Idle were free at the time (C and Python were the first languages I learned). The barrier to programming has always been low as the only thing you needed was books (the internet made things easier) and access to a PC (I had friends with laptop and my school lab).

Even if you go with an open source AI model, it will still make a lot more financial sense to pay a provider then actually invest in the hardware to self-host it.

It's definitely worth investing in self-hosting the agent infrastructure around the model though: all the documents, knowledge base, all the connectors, the agent itself to run on your hardware

How far back are we talking? Historically there were just a few computers in the world, personal computing revolution happened much later. And a private inference rig costs roughly the same in 2026 as a personal computer did in the early 80's, if you want the performance comparable with a personal workstation of that time (vs a mainframe/supercomputer).

Historically the cost of compute has also gone down. Like just look at it as compared to a year ago. We have amazing open source models that can run on consumer hardware and if we go away from our obsession of using opus 4.8 or mythos for everything then it actually is super amazing to see what these open source models could do. I use qwen3.6:27b as a daily driver and I am heavily impressed with it.

I think AI is still in it's "mainframe era". Once upon a time, computers that ran useful workloads filled a whole room. And now that's true of computers that run (state of the art) AI models. My guess would be that this won't always be the case, although I certainly don't claim to have a clear idea of how things will play out.

Roughly about Eur 3-4K right this minute I think? The graphics card, ram and storage are punishing. Under more normal circumstances (hopefully late 2027) it'd be 1500-2500 depending on what you think is realistically useful.

Possibly it's the same price range, allowing for inflation.

With the free tiers available now you can make your own document processors and other such office software, in one pass.

Isn’t this just a bet that I’ll have an AI data center in my iPhone within 10 years? Why is that a bad bet?

If we had 256-512 GB ram unified memories at 2022 prices, we'd be talking 1500 computers.

Hence why brute force needs to be replaced with examples such as neuromorphic methods. It could realistically could be combined with mesh networking as well to utilise the capabilities of all computers locally.