Local coding backups get serious

The useful signal here is not that Qwen2.5-Coder is broken; it is that agent tooling still matters as much as model choice for local coding.

• –Qwen2.5-Coder remains a sensible 16GB-VRAM target, especially in 7B or 14B quantized builds, but OpenCode compatibility issues can make a good model feel unusable.
• –For backup coding, developers should optimize for a stable stack: model, quantization, runtime, context length, and agent client all need to work together.
• –The 16GB tier is now good enough for meaningful local coding assistance, but not for a seamless Claude Code or Codex replacement on large repos.
• –This is infrastructure-adjacent developer news because local LLMs are increasingly part of resilience planning for AI-assisted engineering workflows.