M1 Air local coding hits limits

The interesting signal here is not a new tool, but the ceiling on the "local coding assistant for everyone" narrative: 8GB Apple Silicon is still a hobbyist edge case, not a comfortable dev workstation.

• –Ollama remains the easiest default, and its Product Hunt listing now highlights Apple Silicon MLX speedups, but backend gains cannot erase RAM limits.
• –For coding, sub-8B models can autocomplete and answer small questions, but repo-aware assistance, agent workflows, and larger context windows quickly become painful.
• –Q4 quantization is the realistic target on 8GB; Q5 only makes sense for very small models where the quality gain is worth losing memory headroom.
• –VS Code integration through Continue.dev is the practical local-first path, while cloud tools like Codeium avoid the hardware constraint by moving inference off-device.