Run Qwen Coder & DeepSeek Locally: Free AI Pair-Programmer Setup

A 2024-era laptop with 16GB RAM can run coding models like Qwen2.5-Coder and DeepSeek-Coder-V2 entirely offline, replacing paid Copilot subscriptions. The setup uses Ollama to serve models and Continue.dev to integrate with editors, with model sizes ranging from 1GB to 20GB. The tradeoff is lower quality and higher latency compared to cloud services, but it offers privacy and no usage caps.