M5 Max, 5090 dominate local AI coding

Local AI coding has officially moved from hobbyist experimentation to professional necessity for privacy-conscious developers. Hardware choice now defines the ceiling of capabilities; the RTX 5090's 32GB VRAM and ~1.8 TB/s bandwidth make it the gold standard for real-time code generation with 32B models, while Apple's M5 Max with 128GB unified memory is the only single-chip solution for running massive 70B+ models without extreme quantization. The rise of Qwen2.5-Coder has shifted the "local meta" away from Llama, proving specialized coding models match cloud-tier performance. Tooling like Aider's Git-integrated terminal workflow and Roo Code's agentic capabilities are now primary drivers of adoption. For most workflows, generation speed is less critical than "prefill" speed, where the 5090's Blackwell architecture dominates.